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As the U.S. marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War this year, some attention has been given to African-American resistance to slavery and to the northern radical abolitionists.  Increasingly, it is admitted, even in the South, that the Confederacy’s supposedly “noble cause” was based upon the defense of slavery.  Yet to this day this country continues to deny the race and class dimensions of the war.  There is also a denial, sometimes even on the Left, of the war’s revolutionary implications, not only for African-Americans, but also for white labor and for the U.S. economic and political system as a whole.  And there is still greater ignorance of the fact that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote extensively on the dialectics of race and class in the American Civil War, something I have tried to remedy in my recent book, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies.

Frantz Fanon: The Dialectics of Race, Class, and Revolution

It is a happy coincidence that this year, 2011, is also the 100th anniversary of the 1911 Revolution in China, which targeted both imperialism and indigenous despotism, while supporting democracy and women’s liberation.  More connected to the topic at hand is a third anniversary this year, the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the great Afro-Caribbean revolutionary and philosopher, Frantz Fanon, who, like Karl Marx, has a lot to say to us today about the dialectics of race and class.  Writing as a radical humanist steeped in the works of Hegel and Marx, Fanon sketched a theory of revolutionary violence as both necessary and liberatory when carried out by racially oppressed groups.  He did so on the basis of the experience of one of Africa’s most radical liberation struggles, the Algerian revolution.  In the 1960s in the U.S., this message of violent revolution sparked fear in some quarters, mainly conservative, and admiration in others, mainly radical, especially in Black communities.  In the spirit of those times, which were imbued with Mao Zedong’s concept of guerrilla warfare, Fanon’s message appealed to groups like the Black Panthers. 

At the same time, this focus on Fanon’s theory of violence, which constituted only one chapter of his most important book, Wretched of the Earth, obscured the overall theme of dialectical humanism in Fanon’s work.  For in the magnificent conclusion to Wretched of the Earth, Fanon had called for mutual recognition and solidarity across national and racial lines, between oppressed nations and their former colonizers.  He did so in a wonderfully dialectical discussion, where he argued that the newly independent African peoples, long subjected to both economic and racial oppression, needed to develop further their self-consciousness, including pride in their cultures and histories (Fanon was always very critical, however, of patriarchal and other oppressive traditions), which had been so often demeaned by the colonizers.  While that appealed to Black nationalists of the time, Fanon argued further in his dialectical presentation that such self-consciousness and self-awareness did not mean looking inward or closing oneself off, either individually or as a people.  Instead, he concluded, consciousness of self, what Hegel would have called a particular or singular factor, was what under revolutionary conditions could move us from the particular to the universal of human brotherhood and sisterhood. 

Here is how Fanon famously put it, in that beautiful dialectical language with which he concludes Wretched of the Earth: 

The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.

This may be hard to grasp, especially in today’s climate on the left – as in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, for example — where all forms of national consciousness tend to be rejected as reactionary.

Marx on Ireland: Class, Ethnicity, and National Liberation

But it is in keeping with Karl Marx’s own thinking about race, class, and nationalism.  Sometimes, as I have tried to show in Marx at the Margins, Marx saw the pathway to class consciousness and to proletarian revolution as not direct but indirect.  Take the British workers of the 1860s.  As Marx saw it, by the 1860s, they had become so imbued with condescension, actually racism, toward the Irish – both the Irish minority inside the British working class and the people of Ireland itself, then a British colony – that they too often identified with the British ruling classes. As Marx wrote in the “Confidential Communication” of the First International of January 1, 1870:

In all the big industrial centers in England, there is profound antagonism between the Irish proletarian and the English proletarian.  The common English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages and the standard of life.  He feels national and religious antipathies for him. He views him similarly to how the poor whites of the Southern states of North America viewed black slaves.  This antagonism among the proletarians of England is artificially nourished and kept up by the bourgeoisie.  It knows that this split is the true secret of the preservation of its power.

Note his comparison to race relations in the U.S.  Was such an impasse – whether in the U.S. or Britain — permanent, a “deep structure,” as some radical intellectuals like to say?

Not according to Marx.  Marx believed that an Irish revolution liberating that country from colonialism could break the impasse, not only freeing Ireland of British colonialism, but also opening up new possibilities inside Britain itself. Marx made these arguments in the face of strong opposition from the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who attacked the First International’s support work for Irish political prisoners as a diversion from the class struggle.  In a letter to Engels of Dec. 10, 1869, Marx suggested:

For a long time, I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy. I always took this viewpoint in the New York Tribune.  Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite.  The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland.  The lever must be applied in Ireland.  This is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general. (MECW 43: 398)

This aspiration — for a linkage between anti-imperialist movements and the labor movements of the imperialist countries — was crucial during the twentieth century and remains important today.

France in the 1960s: From Support for National Liberation in the Colonies to Social Revolution at Home

An dramatic example of such a linkage is what happened in France in the 1950s and 1960s, after first the Vietnamese and then the Algerians wrested their independence from French colonialism.  Inside France, the Left had been defeated in the 1950s and had had to swallow the bitter pill of the authoritarian political system set up by Charles De Gaulle’s coup of 1958.  But by the 1960s, new networks inside France that supported the Algerian revolution, which were rooted in a new generation and youth and radical intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, began to blossom.  (One example of this was Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.) They persisted, even in the face of assassination attempts (including one on Sartre), a type of violence the Algerian immigrant community inside France faced in an even starker fashion.  Once Algeria became independent in 1962, France seemed to return to conservative domination for a few years. But in fact, the new mentalities created by the Algerian revolution, as well as the networks of support that had been created for it in France, which helped form a Left considerably to the Left of the reformist and opportunist French Communist Party, played no small role in the explosion of 1968, the most serious revolutionary upsurge in a developed capitalist country since the early 20th century. 

(Of course, an uncritical Third Worldism sometimes accompanied these developments; nor were the Algeria support networks the only revolutionary networks that had existed prior to 1968.  For here one should mention both Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Situationist International, but it should also be noted that if one were to collect the writings of either of these 2 groups on Algeria or the anti-colonial movements more generally, that would be a very short pamphlet indeed.  Somewhat similar libertarian Marxist currents in the U.S., like those around C.L.R. James or the Marxist-Humanists around Raya Dunayevskaya, the latter of which I have been involved in since the 1970s, did respond seriously to the anti-colonial and anti-racist movements, however.)

Marx on the American Civil War: Democratic Aspirations and Economic Reality

During the Civil War in the U.S., Marx penned some of his most significant writings on race and class.  Although these writings have received attention in the U.S. ever since W.E.B. Du Bois cited them in his Black Reconstruction in 1935, followed soon after by a translation of most of them in the volume Marx and Engels on the Civil War in the United States in 1937, unfortunately out of print today, they have received far less discussion than might have been expected. 

Marx viewed the Civil War as a second American revolution, with a socioeconomic as well as a political dimension. He expressed these sentiments in the 1867 preface to Vol. I of Capital: “Just as the in the eighteenth century the American War of Independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so in the nineteenth century the American Civil War did the same for the European working class” (Fowkes trans., p. 91). Of course, he saw the Civil War as a bourgeois democratic rather than a communist revolution, but he also believed that it could be the harbinger of that deeper communist revolution in Europe.  And as it happened, the Paris Commune, a radical communist revolution, did break out in Europe only a few years after the end of the Civil War.

Also, as Robin Blackburn notes in his recent book, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (2011), in Marx’s view, “Defeating the slave power and freeing the slaves would not destroy capitalism, but it would create conditions far more favorable to organizing and elevating labor, whether white or black” (p. 13).  Thus, the war would create new possibilities for American labor, both Black and white. 

Blackburn’s book has brought back into print a few of Marx’s Civil War writings as well.

The Civil War had important economic as well as political implications for Marx.  A Northern victory would, he noted repeatedly, shore up what was, with all of its limitations, one of the world’s few democratic republics.  It would do so not only by defeating the reactionary secessionists of the South, but also by abolishing slavery.  The latter measure would result in formal freedom for a substantial part of the U.S. population, making that democracy more of a reality. (And while the vote for women was also posed in the U.S. in the 1860s, sadly, as we know, that was delayed for 60 more years due to a split between proponents of Black male suffrage and feminists.)

We should not forget as well that in 1861, virtually all of Europe was ruled by monarchies or military regimes, and even those countries with strong parliaments, like Britain, had property requirements for voting that disenfranchised the working classes and even large portions of the middle classes.  The dominant classes of these societies tended to disparage the U.S. “experiment” with universal [white] male suffrage, sympathizing as well with the Confederacy.

The Civil War also had – Marx wrote — huge economic implications concerning land and property. Given the vast and growing size of the U.S. economy and of the proportion of it based upon slave labor, the emancipation of four million slaves without compensation to their “owners” would mean in economic terms the greatest expropriation of private property in history up to that time. 

Another economic aspect concerned landed property in the South. Marx shared the hope of abolitionists and Radical Republicans—and of socialists more generally — that in the occupied South the postwar Reconstruction policies would go beyond the establishment of full political rights for the former slaves and toward a real agrarian revolution that would break up the old slave plantations and redistribute the land.  For example, in the 1867 preface to Capital, Marx alluded to the Radical Republican program of granting forty acres and a mule to the freed slaves.  He did so in a reference to Benjamin Wade, next in line to become President of the United State should the virulently racist and obstructionist Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1865 upon the latter’s assassination, have been successfully impeached by the Radical Republican majority in the Senate: “Mr. Wade, Vice-President of the United States, has declared in public meetings that, after the abolition of slavery, a radical transformation in the existing relations of capital and landed property is on the agenda” (Fowkes trans., p. 93).  This program was shelved the following year, after the Senate’s failure to impeach the reactionary Johnson.

Marx’s Critical Support of the North

Marx strongly supported the North, even at the beginning of the war when Lincoln still refused to place the abolition of slavery on the agenda.  Despite these deficiencies of the North, Marx noted again and again that the South was utterly reactionary, having put the “right” to own slaves as a founding principle of its Constitution. At the same time, Marx issued strong public criticisms of Lincoln.  In an August 30, 1862 article for Die Presse in Vienna, Marx attacked Lincoln’s refusal to endorse abolition as an aim of the war by quoting at length a speech by radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips.  In a widely reported speech in the summer of 1862, Phillips had castigated Lincoln as  “first-rate second rate man” who had failed to grasp that the U.S. would “never see peace… until slavery is destroyed.” 

It should also be noted that when Marx’s First International was founded in 1864, this happened in large part on the basis of labor and socialist networks throughout Western Europe that had supported the North.  These networks mobilized people on behalf of the North during the crucial early years of the war when Britain and France seemed to threaten intervention on the side of the South.  In January 1865, after Lincoln had not only issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but begun to employ Black troops in the Union Army, the International sent a public Address to Lincoln drafted by Marx, congratulating him on his overwhelming victory in the 1864 election.  As Marx pointed out privately, this election victory, unlike the one in 1860, amounted to a ringing endorsement of the politics of emancipation.  The U.S. government actually established relations of a sort with the International, thus going directly to the working class over the heads of the British government, which remained antagonistic toward the North. Not only did U.S. Minister to Britain Charles Francis Adams agree to receive a 40-member delegation from the International to deliver the address.  In addition, after transmitting the Address to Lincoln, on the latter’s instructions Adams issued a remarkably warm public reply to the International on behalf of the U.S. government.  Adams’s official reply stated that “the United States… derive new encouragement to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies” (reprinted in Blackburn, An Unfinished Revolution, pp. 213-14). 

The following year though, when Lincoln’s successor Johnson started to block citizenship rights for former slaves, the International issued another kind of statement about the legacies of slavery in the U.S.  The International’s very forceful Address to the American People of September 28, 1865 is a text that unfortunately has received very little attention.  It appealed over Johnson’s head to the U.S. public.  It included an all-too-accurate warning about racism and resistance down the road in the U.S.:

Permit us also to add a word of counsel for the future.  As injustice to a section of your people has produced such direful results, let that cease.  Let your citizens of to-day be declared free and equal, without reserve.  If you fail to give them citizens’ rights, while you demand citizens’ duties, there will yet remain a struggle for the future which may again stain your country with your people’s blood.  The eyes of Europe and the world are fixed upon your efforts at re-construction, and enemies are ever ready to sound the knell of the downfall of republican institutions when the slightest chance is given. We warn you then, as brothers in the common cause, to remove every shackle from freedom’s limb, and your victory will be complete.

Although Marx did not pen this Address, it is very doubtful that he would have disagreed with this statement of the International, in which his political influence was decisive.

Race, Class and the Civil War in Capital, Vol. I

The theme of race and class in relation to the specific situation facing labor in the U.S. emerged again and again in Marx’s Civil War writings.  This theme can also be found in a passage in Capital that has also been frequently overlooked:

In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic.  Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin. However, a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery.  The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours agitation, which ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California, with the seven-league boots of a locomotive.  The General Congress of Labor held at Baltimore in August 1866 declared: “The first and great necessity of the present, to free the labor of this country from capitalistic slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working day in all the states of the American Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is attained.” (1976: 414, emphasis added)

This passage was central to the chapter on the “Working Day,” where Marx more than anywhere else in Capital took up working class resistance.  The language above to the effect that “labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin” has rightfully drawn the most attention up to now.  Fewer have noted the language about combating “capitalistic slavery” in the statement Marx quotes from the first national U.S. labor congress, language that would become much rarer once the trade union movement became more established and bureaucratic.

In addition, as Raya Dunayevskaya has argued in a treatment of Marx’s Civil War writings that connects them to his overall critique of political economy, Marx added the chapter on the “Working Day” – and the language quoted above on race and class in the U.S. — in a rather late draft of Capital.  He did so, Dunayevskaya holds, under the impact of both the Civil War in the U.S. itself and the massive and principled support movement for the North that emerged on the part of British labor (the latter to be discussed below).  As Dunayevskaya wrote regarding the impact of the Civil War on the structure of Capital, Vol. I, Marx “as a theoretician” was “attuned to the new impulses from the workers,” as a result of which he created some new theoretical “categories” (p. 89). 

Pre-Civil War Writings on Slavery and Capitalism

Marx had on occasion been discussing race, slavery, and capitalism since even before the Communist Manifesto.  In a December 28, 1846 letter to Pavel Annenkov, otherwise famous for its early exposition of his critique of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s version of socialism, Marx connects modern chattel slavery and capitalism:

Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc.  Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry.  It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry…. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance.

In another critique of Proudhon during this period, Marx attacked the common assumption of the day that Blacks were predestined for slavery.  And while he did not publish much on New World slavery until the period of the Civil War in the U.S., there are at least two indications of his intimate knowledge of and sympathy for the abolitionist cause.  One of these lay in the fact that during the 1850s, Marx was the chief European correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, an abolitionist newspaper that he seems to have read most assiduously.

The second indication of his preoccupation slavery can be found in Marx’s private research notebooks, which have begun to be published only in recent decades, in the ongoing Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe or MEGA (Complete Writings).  Among the notebooks that have already been published in the MEGA are excerpts and summaries in a mixture of German and English of two books on slavery by the noted British abolitionist Thomas Buxton.  In August-September 1851, Marx read and annotated Buxton’s The African Slave Trade (1839) and The Remedy; Being a Sequel to the African Slave Trade (1840).  Marx gave great emphasis in his notes to Buxton’s conclusion that, despite Britain’s having abolished first the slave trade (1807) and then slavery itself (1833), the Atlantic slave trade had actually expanded.  Marx took up in great detail Buxton’s figures concerning the massive rate of death during the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas, including passages like the following: “the mortality consequent on the cruelties of the system has increased in proportion to the increase of the traffic, which doubled in amount when compared to the period before 1790” (MEGA IV/9, p. 496). 

This was because, as Marx’s notes from Buxton also suggest, once the British Navy was actively stopping slave ships, the trade went underground without actually diminishing in terms of the numbers of human beings that were being transported into slavery: “Hitherto we have effected no other change than a change in the flag under which the trade is carried on” (MEGA IV/9, p. 497). Moreover, the conditions on slave ships had, if possible, grown worse:

The slaves are now subjected to greater hardships in their being landed and concealed as smuggled goods than they were in former times, when a slave vessel entered the ports of Rio [de] Janeiro and Havana as a fair trader, and openly disposed of her cargo.  Twice as many human beings are now the victims of the slave trade as when [the abolitionists] Wilberforce and Clarkson entered upon their noble task; and each individual of this increased number, in addition to the horrors which were endured in former times, has to suffer from being cribbed up in a narrower space, and on board of a vessel, where accommodation is sacrificed to speed. (MEGA IV/9, p. 497)

Marx’s attention to detail here shows not only his moral outrage against slavery, but also his growing conviction that slavery was at the time a major feature of global capitalism.

In these notes, Marx also takes up Buxton’s discussion of the awful effects of the slave trade upon West African societies, where the trade dominated both the economy and the political order.  As petty African chiefs and kings told the European slavers: “We want three things, viz. powder, ball, and brandy; and we have three things to sell, viz. men, women and children” (MEGA IV/9, p. 499).  Marx seems to endorse Buxton’s view that only if Africa could be allowed to undergo a different type of economic development – taking advantage of its rich soil – could the deleterious effects of slavery inside West Africa begin to be overcome.

Race, Class, and Revolution in the U.S. South

A striking example of Marx’s discussion of race, class, and revolution inside the South is found in a letter to Engels that preceded the outbreak of the Civil War.  Writing on January 11, 1860, in the aftermath of the abolitionist John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia a few weeks earlier, Marx intoned:

In my view, the most momentous thing happening in the world today is, on the one hand, the movement among the slaves in America, started by the death of Brown, and the movement among the slaves in Russia, on the other…. I have just seen in the Tribune that there was a new slave uprising in Missouri, naturally suppressed.  But the signal has now been given. (MECW 41, p. 4)

Brown’s expedition, which included other abolitionists, both Black and white, was an attempt to foment a slave uprising in the Harper’s Ferry area.  

Marx wrote as well of the political and social consciousness of those whom he termed the “poor whites” of the South, noting that only 300,000 out of 5 million Southern whites actually owned slaves.  As the Southern states voted to secede in 1861, touching off the Civil War, he reported on how the votes at secession conventions showed that large numbers of the poor whites did not initially support secession.  In an October 25, 1861 article, “The North American Civil War,” Marx compared the poor whites of the South to the plebeians of ancient Rome, whose class antagonism toward the patrician aristocracy had been tempered by gains the plebeians received from Roman conquests.  Referring to the South’s drive for expansion into new territories where slave labor would predominate, as seen in the Mexican War of 1846, he argued that a similar process was unfolding in the U.S.: 

The number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not amount to more than three hundred thousand, a narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers have been constantly growing through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome’s extreme decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these poor whites with those of the slaveholders, to give their restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves. (MECW 19: 40-41) 

As August Nimtz writes in his Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America (2003), “The forcible incorporation of Northern Mexico into the United States was clearly on Marx’s mind.  He sought to explain the material basis for what would later be called the false consciousness of poor antebellum Southern whites, thus offering insights into the establishment and maintenance of ideological hegemony” (2003: 94).  The need to create new slave states had driven the South to secede in 1861, Marx argued, because Lincoln’s opposition to the creation of new slave states, even though he had not yet advocated abolition of slavery in the present slave states, was a serious threat to the South’s future in the sense discussed above. 

But Marx’s concern was not only the explanation of false consciousness.  He was also examining the possibility of a new form of revolutionary subjectivity that could emerge from the depths of the social system of the South, something that the dominant classes had worked relentlessly to prevent for hundreds of years: the potential for an alliance between poor whites and enslaved Blacks.  The war itself might overturn old social relations within the South, allowing such social contradictions to come to the surface.

Marx’s Arguments with Engels and Lassalle

As Marx saw it, the Civil War would open up revolutionary possibilities for the North as well.  As discussed above, he wrote in Capital of the birth of a national labor movement in the wake of the war.  In addition, as much as Lincoln tried to temporize around the issue of slavery, from the beginning of the war Marx wrote with supreme confidence that the logic of events would over time force the North to support not only the abolition of slavery, but also Black troops in its army, and full civil rights for the former slaves.  In this sense, the Northern cause was as a whole progressive and revolutionary from the beginning, at least implicitly. 

Engels, for his part, was more sanguine about the North’s possibilities for victory, let alone the chances of its adopting any revolutionary policies.  Here, he seems to have shared, at least to some extent, the views of European socialists like Ferdinand Lassalle – a frequent butt of Marx’s withering critiques, which characterized Lassalle as a state socialist, or worse – to the effect that the North lacked both revolutionary radicalism and a real will to fight.  This meant that the South might well triumph in the war, due to the North’s indecision as contrasted with the South’s clear will to fight to defend its reactionary institution. In his arguments with Marx, Engels also pointed to the Southern officer corps’ greater military experience, given the fact that most of the U.S. national officer corps had defected to the South. This debate, which continued for several years in the correspondence between Marx and Engels, was to my knowledge the most explicit political difference to be found in their forty-year relationship.  It was during one of his arguments with Engels that Marx predicted, in a letter of August 7, 1862, that “the North will finally wage war seriously, adopt revolutionary methods” and that this would include the use of Black troops, which “would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves.”^[1]

Proletarian Internationalism: British Workers and the American Civil War

A large portion of Marx’s Civil War writings took up what he referred to in the Inaugural Address to the First International as the need for the working classes to “master for themselves the mysteries of international politics,” part of what later Marxists would call proletarian internationalism.  From the war’s inception, a British or French intervention on the side of the South was feared, something that would have gone a long way toward assuring a Southern victory.  As Marx and other socialists and trade unionists saw it, conservative forces, especially those based in the landowning aristocracy, were attempting to whip up popular sentiment against the North. These conservative voices noted that the North’s blockade of Southern ports, which prevented cotton exports, was causing huge economic hardship among the textile workers of Manchester and other industrial centers. 

In “English Public Opinion,” a New York Tribune article of January 11, 1862, Marx described how the British and Irish working classes of were refusing to embrace the war cries of the British Establishment, even after the U.S. Navy had forcibly boarded a British ship, detaining two Confederate diplomats who had been on their way to London: 

Even at Manchester, the temper of the working classes was so well understood that an insulated attempt at the convocation of a war meeting was almost as soon abandoned as thought of….  Wherever public meetings took place in England, Scotland, or Ireland, they protested against the rabid war-cries of the press, against the sinister designs of the Government, and declared for a pacific settlement of the pending question…. When a great portion of the British working classes directly and severely suffers under the consequences of the Southern blockade; when another part is indirectly smitten by the curtailment of the American commerce, owing, as they are told, to the selfish “protective policy” of the [U.S.] Republicans; …under such circumstances, simple justice requires to pay a tribute to the sound attitude of the British working classes, the more so when contrasted with the hypocritical, bullying, cowardly, and stupid conduct of the official and well-to-do John Bull.

Repeatedly, Marx published articles on large public meetings by British workers to support the Northern cause, even at the cost of loss of jobs at home in the short run.  This constituted one of the finest examples up to that time – and since — of proletarian internationalism. 

As mentioned earlier, these meetings to support the North in the war were crucial in forming the networks out of which the First International emerged. Marx summed up this story succinctly in a letter of November 29, 1864 to Lion Philips.  He discussed how networks in the European labor movement that had supported the North – and later ones supporting the Polish insurrection of 1863 – had coalesced in the fall of 1864 to form the First International: 

In September the Parisian workers sent a delegation to the London workers to demonstrate support for Poland.  On that occasion, an international Workers’ Committee was formed.  The matter is not without importance because… in London the same people are at the head who… by their monster meeting with [British Liberal leader John] Bright in St. James’s Hall, prevented war with the United States. (MECW 42: 47)

The meeting at St. James Hall, also the locale of the founding meeting of the First International, was where British workers and other supporters of the North had gathered to denounce yet another series of bellicose statements toward the U.S. government by the dominant classes. 

Given this history, it was quite natural that, aside from the “Inaugural Address” drafted by Marx outlining its general principles, the newly formed First International’s first public statement was an open letter congratulating Lincoln on his re-election.  In that letter of January 1865, already discussed above in terms of the Lincoln administration’s response, the newly formed First International made explicit the internationalist principles that had motivated British workers to support the North in the face of economic hardship: “From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class…. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause” (MECW 20: 19-20). This refers both to the fact that the U.S. was the largest democratic republic at that time, and also to the large number of European immigrants, especially Germans, who took part in the war, sometimes in command positions.  The surprisingly warm response of the Lincoln administration, quoted earlier, generated for the International its first substantial publicity in the British press. 

Civil War America was a society imbued with lots of revolutionary impulses.  Among other things, this sparked the growth of a large branch of the First International in the postwar U.S., among whose members were the radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips, the only abolitionist leader who made the transition from abolitionism to supporting labor in the Reconstruction era.  And as we know, reactionary forces, not only in the South, but also big capital in the North, worked together to limit the scope of Reconstruction, making sure, for example, that 40 acres and a mule was never achieved for the former slaves.  And by 1876, despite the hopes unleashed during the Reconstruction Era, now dashed, a new order of racial oppression, marked by forced segregation and violent repression, had come into place in the South.  And as we know, this system survived for nearly another century, until the 1960s.

I would like to end on a more general note, however, concerning Marx’s overall perspectives on race, ethnicity, and nationalism, and how they fit into his dialectical framework as a whole and his overall critique of capital, by quoting from the conclusion to my Marx at the Margins: “Marx developed a dialectical theory of social change that was neither unilinear nor exclusively class-based. Just as his theory of social development evolved in a more multilinear direction, so his theory of revolution began over time to concentrate increasingly on the intersectionality of class with ethnicity, race, and nationalism.  To be sure, Marx was not a philosopher of difference in the postmodernist sense, for the critique of a single overarching entity, capital, was at the center of his entire intellectual enterprise.  But centrality did not mean univocality or exclusivity.  Marx’s mature social theory revolved around a concept of totality that not only offered considerable scope for particularity and difference, but also on occasion made those particulars — race, ethnicity, or nationality — determinants for the totality” (p.  244).

******

This article is based on talks in September and October 2011 at Loyola University Chicago, the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Oakland, the Brecht Forum in New York, and the West Coast Marxist-Humanists in Los Angeles.

[First published in USMarxisthumanists.org on October 21, 2011]

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Introduction: A New Era Is Born

In less than three months, the people of North Africa and the Middle East have made two revolutions, in Tunisia and Egypt, and launched a mass uprising followed by a revolutionary civil war in Libya. They have also staged major uprisings in Yemen and Bahrain that may yet go to outright revolution, plus a number of other serious rebellions as seen most recently in Syria. These upheavals – rooted in a new generation of revolutionaries beholden neither to the authoritarian Arab nationalism of the past nor to the radical Islamist currents of more recent years — have resonated throughout the Arab world, with serious protest movements in nearly a dozen other countries in the region.  Operating under the banner of democracy and human rights, these upheavals have challenged the political order, in some cases by toppling longstanding authoritarian regimes.

At the same time, beginning with the crackdown and massacre of the population in Libya, which was soon extended to Bahrain, combined with the attempts by the Egyptian military, with the aid of the Muslim Brotherhood, to channel the revolution into pathways harmless to it and to other entrenched power structures, the Arab revolutions have reached a crossroads.  Will they continue to advance, or will the rulers, aided by global capital, succeed in bringing this revolutionary wave to a rapid end?

The present military intervention by Western imperialist powers in Libya, conducted after calls by the Arab masses and a vote by the Arab League asking for military assistance to prevent the massacre of the people by Qaddafi’s military, does not fundamentally change this dynamic, even though Libya – unlike Egypt and Tunisia – has not in recent decades been closely tied to the Western powers.  Support from these powers will come with a price, whether in civilian casualties or in future attempts at economic or military influence.  In addition, it should be mentioned that the situation in Libya has disoriented some on the global Left, who are getting themselves into the position of concentrating all their fire on opposing an intervention that has gained the support of both the Libyan people and most of the wider Arab world. I will discuss Libya and the urgent need to extend solidarity to the Libyan youth, workers, and women who are engaged in a life and death struggle against Qaddafi’s regime in more detail below.

These Arab upheavals of 2011 have challenged more than the political order, however.  While none have yet moved from political to full social revolution, in their attacks on unemployment and neoliberalism, their important labor dimension, and their more general demands for dignity and social justice, the new Arab revolutions and protest movements have also challenged the economic order.  This combination of political and economic demands is a distinctive mark of the 2011 upheavals.  It also constitutes a point of difference with other important democratic movements of the last few years, which, while massive in size and including the participation of working people, did not critique neoliberalism or develop a distinctive labor dimension.  I refer to movements like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004-05, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in 2005, or the Green Movement in Iran in 2009-10.

Because of their important labor and economic dimensions, the North African and Middle Eastern upheavals can also be connected to the recent labor and youth protests and upheavals in Greece, France, Spain, Ireland, and Britain.  More widely, they can be linked to the “anti-globalization” or global justice movements that have arisen since Seattle in 1999 and that have continued through the World Social Forums and other global networks of resistance to capital.

In recent decades, the Middle East and North Africa seemed trapped between two reactionary alternatives, pro-imperialist authoritarianism imbued with a nominal secularism (as in Egypt) and equally authoritarian religious fundamentalist movements and regimes that operated in the name of anti-imperialism (as in Iran).

In the immediate aftermath of the radical Islamist terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the neoliberal Bush administration plunged into a seemingly permanent “war on terror.” At that point, the world seemed destined to repeat the tragic cycle of the 1980s. Then, as a result of the fundamentalist takeover of the Iranian revolution of 1979, various forms of reaction had taken the global stage, closing off radical and emancipatory politics.  Instead, we had witnessed the flourishing of figures like Ronald Reagan in the US, Margaret Thatcher in Britain, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran.  Each of these leaders cracked down on labor, feminism, Marxism, and any other progressive idea, while also fomenting a spurious “clash of civilizations” between East and West.  A similar process began to take hold in 2001-03, with Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the concomitant rise of radical fundamentalist resistance, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan.

A decade ago, it looked as if September 11, 2001, the Iraq war, and radical Islamism – not the 1999 anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle — would mark the new century.  But with the economic collapse of 2008-09, which was preceded by the exhaustion of US imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan, something new began to stir.  Radical labor movements took root in 2009 and 2010 in Greece, France, and elsewhere, and while these have so far been hemmed in by the power of capital, their emergence raised questions about the stability of the global order.

The Arab revolutions and upheavals of 2011 have gone far beyond such stirrings, to outright revolution. In sidelining both pro-Western authoritarianism and, for the most part, radical fundamentalism as well, these upheavals, carried out by a new generation of youth, have posed the question of the character of the new century in a different way than what occurred after 2001.  In this sense, they can be characterized as post-Islamist as well as post-nationalist.

The events of 2011 suggest, therefore, that Seattle 1999 and the global justice movement it helped to spawn might still be in the running as the marker of the new century. Moreover, on the agenda in 2011 was not only a continuation of the movement for global justice, but also the possibility – and the actuality – of outright revolution, of “regime change” from below, from the masses.

In what follows, I will trace country by country the dialectics of revolution and of mass upheaval as it has emerged over the last few months, and its deeper roots in the new social ferments of the past decade, in many cases largely unnoticed even by close observers of the region.

The Tunisian Crucible

“Revolution is never practical – until the hour of the Revolution strikes. Then it alone is practical, and all the efforts of the conservatives and compromisers become the most futile and visionary of human imaginings” – James Connolly, 1909

The revolution that shook the Middle East and North Africa took place in tiny Tunisia, population 10 million.  Mass discontent came to the surface with a single incident in Sidi Bouzid, an impoverished agricultural town.  On December 17, after having been harassed one too many times by local police, 26-year-old street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself to death in front of the local governor’s office.  Police had confiscated his scale and other property after he had apparently refused to pay them a bribe, and then beat him up when he asked for their return.  Bouazizi’s death galvanized protests among other impoverished youth, who pelted the governor’s office with coins, chanting, “Here is your bribe.”

While this tragic incident may have seemed small at the time, within a month the mass protests it generated had overthrown Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, in power since 1987. Initially, the protests were orchestrated by internet-savvy youths who also received publicity through Al Jazeera, the Arabic language TV network.  In keeping with the international media’s focus on the “middle class” aspect of these and subsequent revolts in the region, it was initially reported that Bouazizi was a college graduate unable to find a job commensurate with his education.  These same reports also played down the fact that the youthful protestors, who were in any case overwhelmingly working class, had by early January gained the support of the previously pro-regime General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT).

Throughout, the revolution had as much an economic as a political character, targeting mass unemployment amidst economic growth, and the amassing of wealth in the hands of a few families connected to the regime.  This can be seen in one of the early chants at demonstrations, “Bread, water, and no Ben Ali.”

By mid-January the protests reached the capital, Tunis, despite the fact that police were using live ammunition to kill demonstrators.  At this point, revolutionary crowds also breached the gates of the elite resort town of Hammamet, torching the mansion of a wealthy member of Ben Ali’s family, burning banks, and putting the police to flight.

The next day, January 14, saw Ben Ali and his family themselves flee to Saudi Arabia, as the revolutionaries scored a victory.  How did this happen so quickly?  The regime had certainly been in power a long time, and had alienated many sectors of the population, especially the poor and the working class.  Moreover, a new generation of youth had come onto the scene, unwilling to put up with Tunisia’s oppressive social relations any longer.  In addition, other sectors, like organized labor and the professional associations came into open opposition once the youth started to move.  Finally, the military refused in the end to fire on the people, leaving the regime and its police force in the lurch.

The Ben Ali regime had originated in a 1987 coup that displaced the nationalist leader Habib Bourguiba, who ruled the country since its independence from France in 1956.  Ben Ali tightened what was already an authoritarian regime, often using the threat of radical Islamism as an excuse to muzzle political life and to gain the support of foreign imperialist powers, especially the US and France.  Elections were routinely rigged, dissidents were imprisoned and tortured, and the general population lived in fear of the secret police.  Ben Ali also allowed the US to send terrorism suspects to Tunisia for interrogation under torture.

Especially in the area of women’s rights, some vestiges remained of the progressive politics of the early years of Bourguiba, who had banned polygamy, banned repudiation and otherwise made the divorce laws relatively egalitarian, legalized abortion, and supported women’s education.  The legacy of this could be seen in the anti-regime protests of 2011, where women took a prominent role.

As the feminist scholar Nadia Marzouki noted, “At all the major demonstrations leading to Ben Ali’s flight from the country, men and women marched side by side, holding hands and chanting together in the name of civil rights, not Islam. The national anthem, not ‘Allahu akbar,’ was the dominant rallying cry, and the women were both veiled and unveiled. The tone of the protests was rather one of reappropriating patriotic language and symbols: Women and men lay in the streets to spell ‘freedom’ or ‘stop the murders’ with their bodies and worked together to tear down and burn the gigantic, Stalin-style portraits of Ben Ali on storefronts and street corners” (“Tunisia’s Wall Has Fallen,” MERIP, Jan. 19, 2011).

At an economic level, Ben Ali dismantled Bourguiba’s heavily statist economy, enacting privatization plans that won the praise of the IMF and the World Bank.  While the GDP grew in recent years at annual rates of 4-5%, unemployment skyrocketed as well, reaching 14% by 2010, with the youth rate much, much higher (Alex Callinicos, “Tunisia: Patterns of Revolt, Socialist Worker, Jan. 29, 2011).

All of this won the public praise of the leading Western powers.  As late as 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, responding to criticisms from human rights groups, opined that “some people are way too harsh with Tunisia, which is developing openness and tolerance in many respects.” Sarkozy added that “the space for liberties is progressing” (cited in Nadia Marzouki, “Tunisia’s Wall Has Fallen”).  In private, however, some US diplomats were more critical.  Cables revealed by Wikileaks last fall expressed disgust at the opulent lifestyle of the Ben Ali clique, one of them describing a party for one of his sons in Hammamet that included ice cream flown in from the French Riviera.  These leaks confirmed the outrage the Tunisian people already felt about the regime.  They also suggested that Ben Ali’s support from outside powers might not be as solid as it seemed on the surface.  Later on, Tunisia’s revolution received several labels, among them the “first Wikileaks revolution.”

Although not widely reported at the time, the mass strikes of 2008 in Gafsa were one indicator of the underlying social tensions in Tunisia. This phosphate-mining region, long a center of labor unrest, has in recent decades been wracked by mass unemployment due to mechanization. In January 2008, the Gafsa phosphate miners rose up after a rare instance of taking on new hires at the mines showed that those hired were the beneficiaries of corruption and nepotism. The revolt lasted six months, after which several of its leaders were imprisoned. Gafsa strikers were not supported by the UGTT, then still tied closely to the state.  The workers did gain the support of dissident bloggers and Facebook users, however, who launched a campaign on behalf of those imprisoned (See Sari Hanafi, “Lessons of the Jasmine Revolution,” Al Jazeera English, Jan. 23, 2011).

After Ben Ali left on January 15, an interim government composed of former regime loyalists took power briefly, but these ministers were forced out under mass pressure ten days later.   Various banned political tendencies reasserted themselves, from the seemingly moderate Islamist party to the Communist Party.   Several women’s associations held a march of several hundred on January 29, putting other revolutionaries on notice that they would fight any attempt by Islamists or other forces to push women back.  Those participating included trade unionists, intellectuals, and youth. One of the demonstration’s leaders, Sana Ben Achour, declared that they had no intention of “exiting one dictatorship in order to fall into another one” (“Nous voulons une Tunisie de lumière scandent les femmes de Tunis,” Tunisie Focus, Jan. 29, 2011).

The outcome of the revolution remains contested at other levels as well.  Youth from all over the country have continued to gather from time to time in Kasbah Square in Tunis to pressure the interim government.  In early March, they succeeded – after a new round of confrontations with the police – in getting more old guard politicians to resign.  As part of these efforts, a High Commission to Safeguard the Revolution has been created, which includes among its members trade unionists and Marxists.  In response, a more conservative political center has arisen in the affluent Tunis neighborhood of Menzah, which claims to represent a “silent majority” opposed to “radicalism” (“Les jeunes de la Kasbah reprennent la révolution tunisienne en main,” Le Monde, March 5, 2011).

Egypt: Linchpin of the Arab Revolution

“On one fine morning the infection has penetrated every organ of cultural life. Memory alone then still preserves the dead form… And the new serpent of wisdom… has in this way painlessly sloughed off merely a shriveled skin” – G. W. F. Hegel, 1807

“What slow and subterranean cultural evolution is at the origin of the revolution…? Without a doubt there has been a double mutation… of the consciousness that the women and men of these Arab peoples have of themselves and of their existence” – Abdennour Bidar, 2011

As in Tunisia, Egypt’s people seemed to have been locked in an attitude of bleak resignation.  Had not the dictator, Hosni Mubarak, blatantly stolen the November parliamentary elections and easily crushed some scattered protests by democratic activists, who were themselves worried that if Mubarak fell, the authoritarian Muslim Brotherhood was waiting in the wings? True, Mubarak was now 82 years old, but he was grooming his son Gamal to succeed him and all seemed well in the US’s key Arab ally, the recipient of nearly $2 billion in annual foreign aid, second only to Israel. Mubarak paid that back in part by making Egypt the world’s largest torture chamber for terrorism suspects sent there as part of the US’s program of “extraordinary rendition” after September 11, 2001.  Egypt was also a torture chamber for its own citizens, who were still living under the state of emergency declared in 1981 following the assassination by radical Islamists of Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar Sadat.

Its economy had shown some signs of prosperity in recent years, averaging over 6% in GDP growth from 2007-09, at a time when most of the world was in recession.  Nonetheless, the mass of Egyptians remained locked in grinding poverty, with per capita GDP just over $2000 per year, with nearly a fifth of the population subsisting on less that $2 per day.  The official unemployment rate has stood in recent years at 10%.  Prices of bread and other staples had also skyrocketed in recent years, hitting not only the poor but also the middle classes.  Gamal Mubarak, Hosni Mubarak’s son who was being groomed as his successor, had been instrumental in pushing neoliberal economic policies that gutted social programs, ended price controls on bread and other basic commodities, and sold off state assets to private interests, whether Egyptian or international.  A favorite of the international banking sector, Gamal Mubarak had gathered around him a group of younger crony capitalists who were cashing in from their involvement in the ruling National Democratic Party to enrich themselves fabulously during this period of privatization.  (See Nomi Prins, “The Egyptian Uprising Is a Direct Response to Ruthless Global Capitalism,” AlterNet, Feb. 4, 2011).

Suddenly, on January 25, just 11 days after Ben Ali’s fall, the revolutionary wave burst over Egypt.  Less than three weeks later, on February 11, the Mubarak regime fell from power under the pressure of a mass democratic movement that took over the streets and pushed back the police. With its youthful courage and mass support, it created a situation whereby the army refused to intervene to protect the regime. As in Tunisia, the movement was overwhelmingly young, women as well as men, with democratic and human rights demands that did not include calls for an Islamic state, and with a strong labor and class dimension.

Below the surface, of course, tensions had been brewing in recent years.  Mass strikes had broken out in 2006, which seemed to peak in 2008, but these were little discussed outside Egypt. Workers were responding to the harsh neoliberal policies – put into place by Gamal Mubarak and his friends – that had been accelerated from 2004 onwards.  Historian Joel Beinin notes “the existence of a whole array of social, political, economic mobilizations that have been going on for the last decade”:

“There were the popular committees in support of the Palestinian uprising in 2000, the popular committees opposed to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Egyptian Movement for Change in 2004-06, which was a pro-democracy movement that demanded that Mubarak not run for reelection in 2005, which of course he did.”

“There was big support for the independence of the judiciary in the spring of 2006. In addition, and most important, there were over 3,000 strikes, sit-ins, and protests by over 2,000,000 workers since 1998. And that’s still going on” (“Historian Joel Beinin on the Egyptian Labor Crisis,” February 2010 http://humanexperience.stanford.edu/beininegypt)

Particularly crucial here was the formation of the April 6 Youth Movement, an internet based group that was organized to support the mass strikes in the textile center of Mahalla al-Kobra in 2008.  On April 6, a general strike took place in Mahalla, in which tens of thousands took to the streets.  After police killed two strikers, crowds set fire to buildings and stomped on a giant portrait of Mubarak in the central square.  The April 6 Youth Movement posted videos of these events on YouTube and Facebook, helping to galvanize wider support.  “This uprising was the first to break the barrier of fear all over Egypt,” recalled Mohamad Murad, a leftist railway worker (Timothy M. Phelps, “Egypt Uprising Has Its Roots in a Mill Town,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 9, 2011; see also Anne Alexander, “Inside Egypt’s Mass Strikes,” International Socialism 118, March 31, 2008).

Another type of social tension involved outrage at police abuse and torture, which extended even to middle class youth.  This came to a head in the summer of 2010 as thousands took to the streets of Alexandria to protest the June 6 death of 29-year-old Khaled Said.  Said was beaten to death in front of a large number of witnesses, after which police told his family that he had choked on a clump of marijuana.

Another set of tensions building below the surface concerned a split inside the dominant classes.  It came from the Egyptian Army, which had ruled the country since 1952, under Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and then Mubarak, and which had for several years been privately expressing its opposition to the efforts to promote Gamal Mubarak as his father’s successor.  This became widely publicized through Wikileaks in December 2010.  The military leaders controlled a vast empire of state-run businesses, and they resented the neoliberal politics of Gamal, who, they also pointed out, had never even completed his military service.  The fact that the State Department was reporting on this also suggested that the US was not putting all its eggs in one basket and that it might not in the crunch support the Mubarak regime.

As the revolutionary movement grew in January and February 2011, many were surprised at the relative marginalization of the Muslim Brotherhood.  The Brotherhood was slow to join the demonstrations.  Moreover, it was silent on the economic oppression facing the overwhelming majority of Egypt’s 85 million people.  As Bassima Kodmani of the Arab Reform Initiative has gone so far as to argue:

“The Islamists have nothing to say about the economic and social situation in the Arab world.  They have not taken part in the social movements.  In Egypt, the social movements are distinct from the Muslim Brotherhood; they have nothing to do with the Islamists.  The latter… have presented no alternative to the burgeoning economic liberalization of these economies” (“La société s’empare de la rue,” Le Monde, Jan. 20, 2011)

This could be seen on January 25, the day of a demonstration called through the Internet by the April 6 Youth Movement in the wake of the Tunisian revolution.  The call for the demonstration centered on the following issues: poverty and unemployment, ending the state of emergency and establishing judicial independence, resignation of the interior minister, and political reforms, including the dissolution of the fraudulently elected parliament, the limitation of the president to two terms, and new elections.  Over 10,000 showed up that day on the streets of Cairo, with other demonstrations across the country.  Police responded brutally, but demonstrators fought back, trying to hold their ground, not only in Cairo, but also in other centers like Alexandria and Mahalla.  Some 800 people were arrested. Working class and poor youth took part in large numbers, as did students and more middle class youth. Adopting a cautious stance, the Muslim Brotherhood and other more established opposition groups were neither seen nor heard from on January 25.

On January 28, taking advantage of the weekly religious holiday, protestors called for a “Day of Rage” following Friday prayers. By now, the crowds had swelled to over a million people from all social classes. By this time, the Muslim Brotherhood and other parties had begun to join in.  The police were overwhelmed by the size of the demonstrations, like nothing Egypt had seen in decades.  In some places, like Alexandria, police essentially surrendered.

Mubarak went on TV announcing some cosmetic changes.  He changed his cabinet and appointing an old security hand, Omar Suleiman, as vice-president.  Protestors responded by calling for the resignation of both Mubarak and Suleiman.  The regime cut off mobile phones and the Internet, but by this time protestors knew where the by now daily demonstrations would take place, in areas like Cairo’s central Tahrir (Liberation) Square, or similar ones in other cities.  However, the Internet cutoff did undermine the April 6 Youth Movement, organized mainly around the Internet.

As soon the movement began to gain steam, Mubarak’s fellow dictators in the region expressed solidarity with him and his regime. Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, himself 86 years old, attacked “infiltrators” among the Egyptian people, while Libya’s Col. Qaddafi telephoned Mubarak to “reassure himself about the situation in Egypt.”  The US also extended support, but as a global superpower it sought as well to assure a transition that would not upset Egypt’s relations with the West and Israel, and above all, one that stopped at the political level rather than challenging the underlying class structure of society. Hedging its bets, and operating with greater subtlety, the US called upon Mubarak to allow the Egyptian people to demonstrate peacefully, but there was no talk of cutting off aid or any kind of real pressure were he to ignore this type of verbal criticism.  Still, it served to undermine Mubarak by making him look a bit weaker than before.

Mubarak also played his last card and called out the military. But the military hesitated. Although it deployed tanks in Tahrir Square and other protest centers, the tank crews were not ordered to do anything.  Instead, the demonstrators, who were by then occupying Tahrir Square, solidarized with the soldiers.

Meanwhile, the police largely disappeared from the streets. Perhaps Mubarak hoped that this would lead to chaos, after which support would flow back to the authoritarian state.  Instead, neighborhoods formed popular committees to enforce security against criminals and regime thugs.

As political scientist Paul Amar reports, the labor movement also took independent organizational action during this period: “On 30 January 2011 clusters of unions from most major industrial towns gathered to form an Independent Trade Union Federation. These movements are organized by new leftist political parties that have no relation to the Muslim Brotherhood, nor are they connected to the past generation of Nasserism” (“Why Mubarak Is Out,” Jadaliyya, Feb. 1, 2011).  The class dimension of the struggle was revealed in another way by those who counted the dead.  As a medical volunteer reported, “Among the dead who fell during the recent demonstrations was found not a single well-known oppositionist, nor even a known activist.  These are young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods, who put themselves on the front lines” (Cécile Hennion, “Au Caire, une foule de manifestants de tous horizons en quête de port-parole,” Le Monde, Feb. 2, 2011).  Class anger was also seen in how the sumptuous home of Ahmed Ezz, a Mubarak crony who controlled two-thirds of the Egyptian steel market and who had also headed the official New Democratic Party’s campaign during the fraudulent November elections, was torched not once but three times during this period.

A day later, on January 31, the military hierarchy announced that it would not repress the people.  Although it took eleven more days for Mubarak to face facts and resign, effectively this was the end of the regime.  In so doing, the military not only sealed Mubarak’s fate, but it also assured its own unity and a major place for itself in post-revolutionary Egypt.  In addition, by moving so quickly from the top, the military brass avoided the possibility that the ranks, which were composed of conscripts, would start to break away from their officers and join the people of their own accord.

By now, hundreds of thousands were appearing in Tahrir Square daily.  In a country where harassment of women on the streets has over the years taken on epidemic portions, new social relations were also emerging.  According to one account:

“Each seemed to bathe in the sense of empowerment represented by the square. From those kneeling in the mud for noon prayers and the couples walking by, with no fear of harassment, the message was the same: They would prove to the government that they were better than it had so long portrayed them. ‘You see all these people, with no stealing, no girls being bothered, and no violence,’ said Omar Saleh. ‘He’s [Mubarak] trying to tell us that without me, without the regime, you will fall into anarchy’.”  (Anthony Shadid, “Obama Urges Faster Shift of Power in Egypt,” New York Times, Feb. 2, 2011).

The gathering on the Square expressed many elements of a new society fermenting within the old. Medical care, food, and security were organized on a decentralized, democratic basis.  Every left wing tendency as well as the Muslim Brotherhood was present, but no single one dominated.  The demands remained centered on democracy, human rights, and the economy, with no mention of an Islamic state. Youths from the Muslim Brotherhood with their heads covered mingled with other more secular youth from groups like the April 6 Youth Movement in amicable fashion.  Moreover, everyone hung together against the murderous assaults of Mubarak’s paid thugs. There has been no clearer example anywhere in recent years of the creative power of mass self-activity for freedom than that 18-day occupation of Tahrir Square.

There was also the fear that established political parties and organizations would try to take over the movement, narrowing its emancipatory agenda. One youth of the square, Amira Magdy, declared, “We don’t need a leader. This system is beautiful” (Kareem Fahim and Mona El-Naggar, “Some Fear a Street Movement’s Leaderless Status May Become a Liability,” New York Times, Feb. 4, 2011).  Such skepticism about a leader from on high was certainly warranted, especially given Egypt’s history of military rulers, but it begged the question of what to do about the fact that some groups like the Army and the Muslim Brotherhood – not to speak of remnants of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party — were already organized, had their agendas, and would sooner or later seek to project those agendas, something they would be able to all the more easily if the more grassroots, secular, and leftist elements of the revolution did not themselves develop a stronger organizational presence in Egyptian society.  Moreover, those more secular elements were deeply divided between proponents of “free market” capitalism and more leftist tendencies.

At this point, a huge strike wave hit the country, often combining political demands with economic ones and calling for the firing of corrupt managers: “A statement issued by iron and steel workers included among its demands the ‘immediate resignation of the president and all men and symbols of the regime,’ the abolition of the tame-cat pro-Mubarak trade union federation and for a general assembly of workers ‘to freely establish their own independent union without prior permission or consent of the regime which has fallen and lost all legitimacy,’ the ‘confiscation of public sector companies that have been sold or closed down or privatized … and [their] nationalization in the name of the people and formation of a new management by workers and technicians,’ the ‘formation of a workers’ monitoring committee in all workplaces monitoring production, prices, distribution and wages,’ and a ‘general assembly of all sectors and political trends of the people to develop a new constitution and elect real popular committees without waiting for the consent or negation with the regime’.”

This was not limited to blue-collar workers: “The mostly female staff at the Egyptian Animal Health Research Center staged a demonstration on the center’s front steps calling for the immediate resignation of the director, Mona Mehrez. ‘She’s totally corrupt,’ one doctor told Daily News Egypt. ‘She used the money allocated for studying and preventing avian flu to build personal villas in Cairo and Alexandria.’ Other members of the strike cited poor working conditions and nepotism as reasons for the protest” (“Egypt: Strike Wave Hits Regime,” Green Left Weekly, Feb. 11, 2011).

Once Mubarak resigned, the military took effective power, appointing a committee to amend the constitution in order to allow for free elections in a short time.  This committee was composed of six judges, all them male.  In a nod to the Muslim Brotherhood, one of its members was appointed to the committee, but no one associated with the more secular opposition was included.  Such a fast track was bound to favor previously established groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the remnants of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party.

While not engaging in much visible repression (although there were reports of the secret detention, torture, and sexual harassment of a number of activists by the military), its other two goals were to clear out Tahrir Square and to bring the strikes to an end, both in the name of stability.  Instead, the strikes continued, whether in Mahalla or at the Suez Canal, although the latter strike did not actually threaten to shut down maritime traffic.  Everywhere, the workers were demanding shake-ups in management. Many were joining the new Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions, the one established on January 30.

When tens of thousands of protestors returned to Tahrir Square on February 25, two weeks after Mubarak’s overthrow, the military attacked them, beating demonstrators and ripping down their tents. The demonstrators were calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq, a Mubarak holdover, and the implementation of core demands of the uprising, like the release of all political prisoners, something that has been carried out only sporadically.  They also expressed support for the Libyan revolution, which had broken out a week earlier.

The military leadership soon backtracked, apologizing for having attacked the demonstrators at Tahrir Square, but suspicions were growing concerning army’s intentions.  The demonstrators were somewhat reassured when Shafiq was replaced as prime minister by Essam Sharaf, a US-educated engineer who had briefly participated in the Tahrir Square demonstrations.  But the grassroots movement continued to act independently, as protestors forced their way into secret police headquarters in several cities, where they set fires and made some surveillance documents public.

A major test of the alignment of forces in post-Mubarak Egypt came on March 20, when the referendum was held on the amendments to the constitution as composed by the military’s six-man committee of judges. The new articles were written as if the president of Egypt would necessarily be a man, and also included a restrictive clause requiring that both parents of an Egyptian presidential candidate had to be Egyptian citizens.  Other language limited the power of the presidency and especially the right to declare a national emergency.  The Muslim Brotherhood campaigned actively in favor of the referendum, while the more secular and leftist groups involved in the revolution campaigned against it, mainly on the basis that too quick elections would favor established organizations like the Brotherhood or even the remnants of Mubarak’s party.  During the campaign, some of the more liberal and leftist groups formed the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, but others, like the April 6 Movement, decided to remain a non-party watchdog type organization.

Liberals and leftists made strenuous efforts to organize public meetings across the country to present critiques of the amendments and the accelerated calendar for national elections, drawing large crowds in many cities.  “It is a battle between the liberal democratic forces and two other forces – reactionaries from the old regime and the Islamists in general,” stated one prominent member of the more secular wing, the Internet activist Mohamed Ghoneim. At the same time, complained Ghoneim, rumors were being spread by amendment supporters to the effect that if people voted no, they would be actually voting to remove all references to Islam from the constitution (Neil MacFarquhar and Michael Slackman, “Hopeful Egypt Votes on Shape of Its Future,” New York Times, March 28, 2011). In the end, the referendum passed by a very wide margin, 77% to 23%. This was a serious setback for the more secular, liberal, and leftist forces that had been in the forefront of the revolution.  The process of the referendum also suggested that a tacit alliance has been formed between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military.

Another troubling issue concerns women’s rights.  While the Egyptian revolution involved millions of women struggling alongside men in an atmosphere of relative equality, especially in Tahrir Square, the legacy of male domination – and not only from Islamist tendencies – remains strong.  Thus, when a group of several hundred women demonstrated in Tahrir Square on March 8, International Women’s Day, they were harassed and driven off the Square by male bystanders who told them they belonged in the home.  Two weeks earlier, in an article denouncing the absence of women on the committee drafting the constitutional amendments, the veteran feminist Nawal al-Saadawi, who at age 79 had gone into Tahrir Square, warned:  “History has taught us how popular revolutions are aborted by remnants of the ousted regime, and the first thing to be abandoned is the rights of women” (Shortcomings of the New Constitution Committee,” Al-Ahram Weekly, Feb. 26, 2011).  In addition, women have sometimes been harassed and even raped, not only on the streets or when detained by the military or the police, but on occasion even inside crowds supporting the revolution, as happened to US reporter Lara Logan on February 11.  This has led some to compare the situation to Iran in 1979, when the first sign of just how reactionary the new regime would be was seen in the attacks on the March 8 women’s demonstration in Tehran.  But 2011 is not 1979. No political force in Egypt today, not even the Muslim Brotherhood, is putting forth the slogan of an Islamic Republic, or making restrictions on women’s rights part of its program.  Moreover, Saadawi and others are engaged in refounding the Egyptian Women’s Union.

At the end of March, student protests broke out, demanding that corrupt regime hacks serving as university presidents and in other top academic positions be ousted.  The military police intervened brutally, but then there was another apology from on high.

Overall, the situation in Egypt remains extremely fluid, with the more leftist and secular democratic forces, as well as labor, having spearheaded an actual revolution, and having grown and developed from that process, which has involved millions of people.  That revolution has created a new consciousness, not only in Egypt but also in the Arab world as a whole.

With Egypt, the Arab world’s largest country, in the throes of revolution, some have been pointing to a new form of Pan-Arabism as the revolt spread far and wide.  Among them was journalist Lamis Andoni, who wrote: “The scenes are reminiscent of those that swept Arab streets in the 1950s and 1960s.  But this is not an exact replica of the pan-Arab nationalism of those days. Then, pan-Arabism was a direct response to Western domination and the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel. Today, it is a reaction to the absence of democratic freedoms and the inequitable distribution of wealth across the Arab world. We are now witnessing the emergence of a movement for democracy that transcends narrow nationalism or even pan-Arab nationalism and which embraces universal human values that echo from north to south and east to west” (“The Resurrection of Pan-Arabism, Al Jazeera English, Feb. 11, 2011).

One of the next places the Arab revolution hit was Libya.

Libya: Revolution, Counterrevolution, and Intervention

“The subjectivism that we have been considering – Mao’s – which has no regard for objective conditions, behaves… as if a party of the elite that is armed can both harness the energies of men and ‘remold’ their minds” – Raya Dunayevskaya (1963)

After the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, some on the left were suggesting that these events showed above all a defeat for Western imperialism, as they had broken out in two of the closest allies of the West in the Arab world.  But when Libya erupted on February 15, only four days after Mubarak’s fall, the full breadth of the 2011 Arab revolutions became more evident.

Headed since 1969 by Col. Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan regime takes the form of a semi-totalitarian dictatorship that has sought to rule over not just the lives of its 6.5 million citizens, but their very minds. A Green Book of Qaddafi’s sayings, which purports to lay out a “third way” between socialism and capitalism, was virtually enshrined after its publication in 1976.  If Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book from the Chinese Cultural Revolution could be regarded as part of a tragedy that set Chinese development back by decades and disoriented the 1960s generation of revolutionaries around the world, Qaddafi’s Green Book could be considered part of a farce, but not if one were a Libyan forced to absorb it from childhood onwards. One could even be compelled to listen day and night to recordings of Qaddafi’s speeches while being imprisoned and physically tortured for real or imagined opposition.  When the hour of revolution struck this year, among the first edifices of the regime to come down were the ubiquitous statues in public squares of the Green Book, an excess that did even Mao one better.

Qaddafi has a long history of confrontations with Western imperialist powers and with Israel, as well as many of his Arab neighbors.  He has also supported various terrorist movements, and occasionally, more progressive insurgent movements.  In 1986, Libya was bombed by Ronald Reagan, who saw Qaddafi as a convenient target through which to build support for his militaristic assaults on countries that had opposed American imperialism, above all what was then a truly revolutionary country, Nicaragua.  By 2004, however, Qaddafi made his peace with the US and Britain, after which he and his British-educated son Saif enjoyed a sort of honeymoon in the Western media and among intellectuals, not least Anthony Giddens, the British sociologist and theorist of Blairism (see Giddens, “My Chat with the Colonel,” [Manchester] Guardian, March 9, 2007; see also Elisabeth Rosenthal, “A Son Radiates His Own Light in His Father’s Libya,” New York Times, Sept. 23, 2007).

Libya is also a wealthy oil producer, with a per capita GDP of $12,000 per year, but in reality, most of that largesse has been squandered on Qaddafi’s pet projects, whether at home or abroad.  There is little of the economic and social infrastructure that one finds in the oil kingdoms of Arabia and the Gulf.  But the oil largesse also means that, as in those kingdoms, the military and security forces are to a great extent composed of foreign mercenaries, and, whether of domestic or foreign origin, exceedingly well paid to do the regime’s dirty work.

The spark that launched the Libyan uprising was seemingly small.  On the afternoon of February 15 in the eastern city of Benghazi, Libya’s second largest, Fathi Terbil was arrested at his home by 23 security agents. A human rights lawyer, Terbil was being targeted because he was involved in plans for a demonstration in the spirit of the Egyptian revolution to be held on February 17. Terbil had been among a small number of attorneys representing the families of some of the 1270 political prisoners executed in 1996 at Abu Salim prison in Benghazi. By the evening of the February 15, 2011, events took a sudden turn, as hundreds gathered outside the police station to demand Terbil’s release.  The regime’s police hesitated, releasing Terbil conditionally, a clear sign of weakness.  Within two days, by Feb. 17, eastern Libya was in full insurrection (Nicolas Bourcier, “Libye: L’Homme qui a fait le printemps,” Le Monde, March 22, 2011).

The 1996 massacre had taken place after the prisoners at Abu Salim had gone on strike and occupied part of the prison in order to demand medical care, better conditions, family visits, and the reopening of their cases.  Abdallah Senussi, chief of security to this day, promised to meet all of the demands except new trials, which he said was not in his power to grant. The prisoners accepted this and returned to their cells.  The next day, some 400 were taken to another prison, after which soldiers started firing from the roof at the remaining prisoners, killing 1270 men (Nicolas Bourcier, “Le massacre d’Abou Salim,” Le Monde, March 22, 2011).

Ever since, the families of those killed, especially the women, have kept up their attempts to seek justice.  As recounted by the Franco-Libyan writer Kamal Ben Hameda: “The ‘madwomen’ of beautiful Benghazi, initially not very numerous, opened up a breach [in the system] with their weekly demonstrations.  In the unfolding of their very despair at never being able to see their loved ones, they opened up a terrain of hope in being the first to dare to speak out in a public square, in the face of the henchman of [Qaddafi]” (‘Qu’il parte, le tyran de Tripoli!,” Le Monde, Feb. 25, 2011).

As the mass demonstrations began in Benghazi and nearby towns on February 17, 2011, Qaddafi’s police were utterly merciless, shooting people on the streets with live ammunition. But this only enraged the crowds, which kept coming back, larger and larger.  Soon they were being joined by defecting soldiers and police, who had weapons, including a few tanks.  Lightly armed youths repeatedly stormed security headquarters buildings where they faced machine-gun fire, yet they kept coming until they succeeded.

By February 20, Benghazi had fallen to the revolution and unrest was also breaking out in the capital, Tripoli, over 500 miles to the west.  At one in the morning that same day, Saif Qaddafi, the reputed liberal within the leadership, went on TV.  “Libya is not Tunisia or Egypt,” he warned, threatening all out war to keep the regime in power.  If a civil war started, he added chillingly, Libya would be “mourning hundreds of thousands of casualties.”  At this point, a number of top regime officials began to defect to the revolution, including the whole of Libya’s United Nations delegation.  Saif Qaddafi was not joking, and in the coming days, the regime massed thousands more lavishly paid fighters in Tripoli, many of them drawn from other African countries to the south.

Within a week, on Friday, February 25, Qaddafi’s forces succeeded in suppressing mass unrest in Tripoli.  By now, however, many of the surrounding cities had fallen to rebels.  At this point the structure of the new society began to be posed.  It was recalled that Libya had once had numerous political parties – Nasserite Arab nationalists, leftists, and Baathists — and a sizable labor movement as well, all of them driven underground by the regime.  To what extent they had survived underground or even as a memory remained unclear.  What was clear was that in places like Benghazi, people were expressing basic democratic aspirations.  For her part, Iman Bugaighi, a representative of the Transitional National Council, stated: “We want a democratic republic, multiparty, which respects the rights of ethnic minorities like the Taoureg, Amazighs, or Berbers.  No party scares us.  If the Islamists receive 5% of the vote, we will accept them as part of the political debate” (interview with Nicolas Bourcier, “L’insurrection est ‘au debout d’un processus qui ne s’arrêtera pas,” Le Monde, March 12, 2011). Despite such declarations, we do not know as much about the Libyan rebels as we did about those in Tunisia and Egypt, which had over the years had a little more scope to develop their agendas, as seen with groups like Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement.  For his part, Col. Qaddafi asserted that the rebels were Al Qaeda militants and crazed drug addicts, something that was laughed at in the liberated areas of the country.

Those in the liberated towns and cities had little time for debate over these issues, however. For by the middle of March, the tide of battle had turned.  Qaddafi’s oil money had succeeded in mobilizing a military force sufficiently organized and well armed that it began to retake many of the towns that had gone over to the revolution.  The numbers massacred in these first days of counterrevolutionary violence were said to number as many as 8,000.

Soon, the troops of the counterrevolution were at the edge of Ajdabiya, the gateway to Benghazi and the entire eastern region.  The fear returned. This was a very somber moment, not only for Libya, but also for the Arab world as a whole.   Referring to how King Al Khalifa of Bahrein had invited Saudi troops in to launch a violent crackdown on the mass democratic movement there, Maylif, a Libyan revolutionary in Benghazi who gave only his first name, told a Western reporter: “If we give in, all the dictators of the region will follow the example of Qaddafi.  In Bahrein, they are also beginning a bloody repression” (Nicolas Bourcier, “Benghazi doute: ‘C’est la guerre, ce n’est plus la révolution,” dit une figure de la rébellion,” Le Monde, March 15, 2011).

At this point, a surprising turn occurred at the international level.  The Arab League, meeting in Cairo on March 12, voted to support a no-fly zone over Libya in order to save the Libyan people from a disastrous massacre at the hands of Qaddafi’s forces. This was a surprising decision in light of the League’s longstanding position against interference in the internal affairs of Arab countries.  Evidently, the mass revolutions and protests had put considerable pressure on that body.

After considerable diplomatic maneuvering by the US and other Western powers, the UN Security Council voted on March 17 to authorize a no-fly zone and other measures against tanks and artillery to prevent a wholesale massacre of the Libyan people.  This vote was equally surprising, since Russia and China have almost always used their veto power to block such resolutions concerning humanitarian intervention. Over the years, they have done so with regard to genocide in Sudan and Bosnia, just as the US has used its veto to block even strong criticism of Israel, and would surely veto a no-fly zone over Gaza to protect Palestinian civilians from Israeli air attacks. This time though, Russia and China abstained, allowing the resolution to be voted through.  Evidently, they too were worried about a backlash from the Arab world were they to have blocked intervention to protect the Libyan people.

The US, the main imperial power in the region, realized that if it allowed Benghazi to fall after having called upon Qaddafi to stop his crackdown, it would suffer an irreparable blow to its image in the eyes of a new generation in the Arab world.  However, the US intervened very reluctantly, after having said it would not do so unless the UN Security Council supported intervention, a barrier that initially appeared to be insurmountable.

When the US and other powers intervene in during a revolutionary civil war, as in Libya, one of their concerns, here as elsewhere, is undoubtedly to make sure that these revolutions are channeled in such a way that they stop at the political level, and do not go on to challenge the class, property, and production relations of society.  Thus, the US is glad the Egyptian Army has assumed control after Mubarak’s fall.  And it goes without saying that the US is of course being hypocritical, as it does nothing to protect the Palestinian people, and precious little to support the democratic aspirations of those in revolt against governments that it has supported, especially in Bahrain and Yemen.

Within days of the UN vote, massive air strikes by the US, France, and Britain decimated Qaddafi’s forces. The Libyan Air Force was nearly destroyed, and tank units that were outside Ajdabiya and moving toward Benghazi were destroyed.  As these attacks continued, Qaddafi’s by now overmatched forces pulled away or fled from the eastern region, leaving Benghazi in the hands of the uprising.  After a few days of fighting, the revolutionary forces eventually retook Ajdabiya as well. By the end of March, the revolution had taken back control of most of eastern Libya. In the west, which included Tripoli, Qaddafi retained control of most areas, except for the port city of Zawiya, which had bravely resisted for weeks.  But even in locked-down Tripoli, Libyans found ways to express their oppositional sentiments.  This occurred most dramatically on March 26, when battered and bruised Iman al-Obeidi burst into a hotel lobby filled with Western reporters in Tripoli to tell of her torture and rape at the hands of Qaddafi’s soldiers.  She was brutally silenced, and the taken away, to an uncertain fate.

From the beginning of the Libyan uprising, some voices on the left defended Qaddafi on the basis of his past support for some anti-imperialist causes.  Among them was Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, who telephoned his “friend” Qaddafi, declaring that the Libyan leader was “about to take part in another great battle” (“Castro, Chavez, Ortega aux côtés de Kadafi,” Le Monde, February 28, 2011).  Once a principled revolutionary, Ortega has almost totally discredited himself in recent years as he has clung to power in alliance with some of Nicaragua’s most reactionary political forces.  Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro were initially a bit more measured in their remarks, but this changed once the US-UN intervention started, after which anti-imperialism trumped all other factors, even the need to support a people in its struggle for democracy and human rights.  Castro declared:  “Not even the fascist leaders of Germany and Italy were so blatantly shameless regarding the Spanish Civil War unleashed in 1936.”  Amazingly, Castro was not comparing the butcher Qaddafi to Franco’s fascists, but instead the Libyan democratic revolutionaries! (“NATO’s Fascist War,” Counterpunch, March 29, 2011). Chavez also supported Qaddafi, extending that support as well to his “brother,” the “humanist” Bashir Assad of Syria as well, once that country also began to feel the tremors of revolution (“Venezuela’s Chavez Offers Supports to Syrian Leader Amid Protests, Blames US for Unrest,” Washington Post, March 26, 2011). Another vocal supporter of Qaddafi was the conservative Black nationalist and anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, who referred portentously to the Libyan dictator as someone whom “God raises… from among you,” then going on to a cover a number of other themes, including the need for Black women to dress conservatively, all of this at an event celebrating the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi (Farrakhan Defends Gadhafi, Pans US Role in Libya,” Associated Press, March 25, 2011).

A sort of knee-jerk anti-interventionism gripped certain parts of the intellectual left as well, of a type we have experienced before, especially during the Bosnian and Kosova wars a decade ago.  Alexander Cockburn, who infamously argued in the 1990s that the Bosnians shelled their own civilians to gain international sympathy and who defended the genocidal and Islamophobic Slobodan Milosevic until the end, termed the Libyan intervention “one of the stupidist martial enterprises” since Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.  He also supported Qaddafi’s ludicrous charges that his opponents are Al Qaeda supporters (“Libya, Oh What a Stupid War,” Counterpunch, March 25-27, 2011).

These kinds of arguments have been answered with great incisiveness from other parts of the left.  The noted Middle East scholar and blogger Juan Cole demolished Qaddafi’s argument about fundamentalism: “The libel put out by the dictator, that the 570,000 people of Misrata or the 700,000 people of Benghazi were supporters of ‘al-Qaeda,’ was without foundation. That a handful of young Libyan men from Dirna and the surrounding area had fought in Iraq is simply irrelevant. The Sunni Arab resistance in Iraq was for the most part not accurately called ‘al-Qaeda,’ which is a propaganda term in this case. All of the countries experiencing liberation movements [today] had sympathizers with the Sunni Iraqi resistance; in fact opinion polling shows such sympathy almost universal throughout the Sunni Arab world. All of them had at least some fundamentalist movements. That was no reason to wish the Tunisians, Egyptians, Syrians and others ill” (“An Open Letter to the Left on Libya,” The Nation, March 28, 2011).

As far as the narrower forms of anti-imperialism common in some parts of the Left were concerned, Cole, whose own writings are staunchly anti-imperialist, added:  “Leftists are not always isolationists. In the US, progressive people actually went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, forming the Lincoln Brigade. That was a foreign intervention. Leftists were happy about Churchill’s and then Roosevelt’s intervention against the Axis. To make ‘anti-imperialism’ trump all other values in a mindless way leads to frankly absurd positions. I can’t tell you how annoyed I am by the fringe left adulation for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the grounds that he is ‘anti-imperialist,’ and with an assumption that he is somehow on the Left. As the pillar of a repressive Theocratic order that puts down workers, he is a man of the far Right, and that he doesn’t like the US and Western Europe doesn’t ennoble him.”

The Middle East scholar and Marxist thinker Gilbert Achcar also supported “the victory of the Libyan democratic uprising,” whose “defeat at the hands of Qaddafi would be a severe backlash negatively affecting the revolutionary wave that is currently shaking the Middle East and North Africa.”  As to the intervention, Achcar argued:

“We all know about the Western powers’ pretexts and double standards. For example, their alleged concern about harm to civilians bombarded from the air did not seem to apply in Gaza in 2008-09, when hundreds of noncombatants were being killed by Israeli warplanes in furtherance of an illegal occupation. Or the fact that the US allows its client regime in Bahrain, where it has a major naval base, to violently repress the local uprising, with the help of other regional vassals of Washington.”

“The fact remains, nevertheless, that if Gaddafi were permitted to continue his military offensive and take Benghazi, there would be a major massacre. Here is a case where a population is truly in danger, and where there is no plausible alternative that could protect it. The attack by Gaddafi’s forces was hours or at most days away. You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians. In the same way, even though we know well the nature and double standards of cops in the bourgeois state, you can’t in the name of anti-capitalist principles blame anybody for calling them when someone is on the point of being raped and there is no alternative way of stopping the rapists” (“Libyan Developments,” interview with Stephen Shalom, Znet, March 19, 2011).

To be sure, whether in North Africa or elsewhere, revolutions that survive with the help of imperialist powers will necessarily pay a price for not having been able to prevail on the basis of their own resources.  It goes without saying that if the movement against Qaddafi can survive with US and Western help, the US and other powers will seek to influence and channel it, above all steering it away from deepening its agenda beyond political change and into any sort of challenge to imperialism or neoliberalism.  Moreover, these powers are profoundly hostile toward any kind of revolution from below, which is why they are trying to engineer a coup from the top, from within the Qaddafi regime’s inner circle. However, the vulgar Marxists are wrong to say the intervention is about oil, since the US and other powers—and the global corporations — have been able to tap Libya’s oil under Qaddafi without any problem. Nonetheless, other imperialist aims might emerge as the situation unfolds.  For example, if the rebels were to win with US and Western help, the US could, for example, try to re-establish a permanent military base in Libya, something it was never allowed to do even by the Mubarak regime in Egypt.

While is it unfortunate the Libyan revolution has had to seek this sort of outside help, it should be underlined, as mentioned above, that oil monarchies and dictatorships — from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain to Libya — have financial resources that allow them to hire mercenaries to do their fighting for them, forces that are impervious to popular sentiment in a way that the conscript Egyptian Army is not.  Should Qaddafi fall, it would have a salutary effect throughout the region on such countries, not least on Saudi Arabia, which also relies on hired mercenaries (often linked as well to outside imperialist powers) to keep one of the world’s most reactionary regimes in power.

As Marxist-Humanists, we have always based our political-philosophical perspectives on the human subjects engaging in revolt and resistance, and on the need to ensure their positive self-development. We have refused to ignore their subjectivity in order to turn the focus away from these emancipatory and humanist principles and toward a narrow focus on the machinations of various state powers that may temporarily claim to support them. That was true of our support for the East German Revolt of 1953 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and later on, of our support for the Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and our principled solidarity with Bosnia’s struggle against Serbian national chauvinism in the 1990s. Such principles have never been more important than now, as the Arab revolutions reach the crossroads.

Concluding Remarks

“A revolutionary movement does not spread by contagion, but by resonance.  Something that develops here resonates with the shock waves produced by something over there” – Jean-Marie Gleize

During this same period, major uprisings also took place in Bahrein and Yemen, albeit without quite as markedly a post-Islamist character as has been observed in Tunisia and Egypt.  In Bahrein, the long-oppressed and economically exploited Shia majority rose up in a nonviolent mass movement, maintaining its discipline even in the face of being gunned down by police from the Sunni-led monarchy of that small oil kingdom.  Bahrein is now on lockdown after the regime called upon Saudi Arabia to send troops to aid it in repressing its own people.  Since the US has a major military base in Bahrain, it has only haltingly commented, calling a negotiated settlement with the monarchy rather than democracy.  In Yemen, an even more complex situation is unfolding, as the decades long rule of the Ali Abdullah Saleh regime is facing a mass nonviolent uprising of students, intellectuals, workers, and rural people, with key figures in the military and the state having gone over to the uprising.  Again because it is a US ally, in this case in the face of some pockets of Al Qaeda militants in rural areas, the US has been even more reticent about giving any support to the democratic movement, which appears to be on the verge of at least some sort of victory.

The Arab revolutions of 2011 have resonated far and wide, impacting in some form almost every Arab country in the region, from Morocco to Iraq and from Palestine to Sudan, also hitting non-Arab Iran, where demonstrations also occurred in February.  By March, a democratic movement surfaced even in Syria, one of the Middle East’s most repressive dictatorships, which has not hesitated to massacre and assassinate its opponents, at home and abroad.

One of the key characteristics of the 2011 movements is that they are no longer dominated by Islamism, which has served to distort and displace radical opposition to imperialism in a reactionary direction ever since the Iranian revolution of 1979.  As Olivier Roy, a noted French specialist on Islam, writes: “If one considers those who launched this movement, it is clear that it is a post-Islamist generation…. This new generation is not interested in ideology: its slogans are all pragmatic and concrete: ‘Step down!’  They do not appeal to Islam as did their predecessors in Algeria at the end of the 1980s.  They express above all a rejection of corrupt dictatorships and a demand for democracy” (“Révolutions post-Islamistes,” Le Monde, February 13, 2011).

Over the last three decades, Islamist uprisings were crushed by authoritarian nationalist and nominally secular states, as in Egypt and Algeria, which took advantage of the radical Islamists’ indiscriminate violence to gain a second wind that preserved the existing system for another generation. But the authoritarian regimes that defeated Islamism also exhausted themselves during this struggle, leaving them vulnerable to the new revolutionary wave that broke out in 2011.  One could argue, therefore, that the new Arab revolutions are not only post-Islamist, but also post-authoritarian nationalist, in the sense that they will no longer abide with authoritarian regimes that attempt to keep themselves in power, whether by appealing to nationalism, to the fear of Islamist takeover, or to the need to unite against Israel or Western imperialism.

Roy and others are certainly correct that the new revolutionary movements exhibit an anti-ideological character.  And while a somewhat cynical former Maoist like Roy applauds this, it too has its problems, not least that it cuts these movements off from the Marxist tradition, and all of its intellectual resources concerning both revolution and the critique of capital.  But it also should be noted that the anti-ideological sentiment of 2011 is different from that of the 1980s, when the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe were collapsing and “non-ideological” meant adopting Margaret Thatcher’s infamous nostrum that there is no alternative to capitalism, and thereby offering no real critique of her savage form of neoliberalism.  Instead, the North African and Middle Eastern revolutions of 2011 are deeply hostile to neoliberal capitalism, to the accumulation of wealth by the few and the exploitation and marginalization of the many. Moreover, most of the current movements have strong links to labor.  In this sense, a truly radical opening has been created, not only for North Africa and the Middle East, but also for the world (see Paulo Morel, “Egypt: The Times Are Changing,” U.S. Marxist-Humanists, February 4, 2011). It therefore behooves us not only to support these movements, but also to learn from them, all the while engaging in the type of critical dialogue that is the hallmark of Marxism and Marxist-Humanism.

[This article was first published in US Marxist-Humanists on April 2, 2011]

In recent decades, Marx’s critics have fallen into two large groups, sometimes overlapping of course. In neoliberal ideology, Marx is considered a dead dog because he tried to take us beyond capitalism, to which there is supposedly no alternative. Along similar lines, it is also claimed the Soviet collapse invalidates empirically Marx’s allegedly impractical and utopian schemes.

In left and progressive academic circles, however, the critique of Marx has usually taken a different direction. In these quarters it is often said that the problem with Marx is not that he was too radical, as the neoliberals say, but that he was not radical enough. Some add that the truly radical thinkers are people like Foucault, Deleuze, even Nietzsche. These critics – most famously Edward Said – attack Marx for adopting what they see as a unilinear model of development in the modernist mode. (Postmodernists term this a grand narrative.) Here, much of the debate has revolved around Marx’s 1853 articles on India and a passage in the Communist Manifesto (1848) on China. At a more general level, it is said even more often among progressives that Marx informs us on class and economic structures but that his theoretical model does not incorporate race, ethnicity, gender, or nationalism at all, or at least not very much.

I think responding to these critiques – especially the ones from the progressive left – is as important as the earlier effort to separate Marx’s original vision from Stalinism and totalitarianism, an effort that still remains necessary today. That link of Marx to Stalinism – although in my view invalid – is part of what has fostered the growth anarchism among so many younger radicals today.

In this article, I will respond to the kinds of criticisms of Marx that have been coming from parts of the progressive left and which center on charges of unilinearism and grand narrative, ethnocentrism, and lack of concern with race, ethnicity, gender, and nationalism[1]. At the outset, it should be noted that Marx himself lived at the margins, where his thought is still relegated to this day. The deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida captures well Marx’s marginality as a political refugee in Victorian London, linking it to his equally marginal position within the Western intellectual tradition: “Marx remains an immigrant among us, a glorious, sacred, accursed but still clandestine immigrant as he was all his life” (1994: 174).

I. The Non-Western “Other”: India, China, Russia

Some of Marx’s critics have a point in terms of his early writings on India and China. Marx begins with a somewhat modernist and unilinear perspective toward those countries, but moves gradually toward a more multilinear and multicultural approach toward India and other non-Western societies.

As noted by Edward Said in his Orientalism (1978) and by other critics, Marx’s 1848-53 writings on India and China exhibit Orientalist notions of modernity, occasionally accompanied by ethnocentric ones, in which European colonialism is portrayed as a necessary stage on the road toward social development for societies trapped in an unchanging traditionalism. He begins to alter this perspective in the late 1850s, particularly in the Grundrisse and in his writings on anti-colonial resistance in India and China. By the time of his late writings of 1879-82 (some of which are still unpublished), Marx has moved toward a more anti-colonialist position and a more multilinear approach to social development in which certain premodern social forms, especially communal property, are seen as building blocks for an alternative form of modernity. Let us trace some of this evolution in his thought.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels write famously in praise of Western capital’s penetration of Asia, of its “battering down of all Chinese walls” and of its drawing “even the most barbarian nations into civilization” (MECW 6: 488).  Here they seem (1) to view Western colonial incursions into Asia, including England’s notorious First Opium War against China of 1839-42, as on the whole a progressive and beneficial undermining of Oriental “barbarism” and (2) to assume that the rest of the world would sooner or later follow in the footsteps of the more technologically advanced Western European nations. Marx and Engels’ praise for this early stage of capitalist globalization can be seen as part of their overall sketch of the achievements of capitalism in Western Europe and North America, a sketch that is followed by a withering critique of capitalist exploitation. However, they do not follow their praise of Western colonialism in Asia with a similar critique. Instead, Marx held in 1848 to an implicitly unilinear model of development in which India and China would, as they were swept more deeply into the world capitalist system, over time develop similar contradictions to those of the already industrializing countries of Western Europe and North America.

These themes are developed further in Marx’s 1853 writings on India for the New York Tribune. It is true that in one passage Marx evokes notions of an independent India shaking off the chains of British colonialism, something not mentioned by Said. But it should be noted that even in his evocation of an independent India, he implies that this is to be an India that has first modernized along Western European lines.

Moreover, Marx’s portrait of Indian culture and society in 1853 is often condescending. Here following Hegel, he describes India as a static society that lacks any real historical development, except that introduced by its conquerors, from the Arabs and the Mughals to the British (MECW 12: 217). The British represent a “superior” civilization, he concludes (218). In the face of these conquerors over the centuries, he writes, India proved to be “an unresisting and unchanging society” (217). The roots of this are said to lie in India’s economically self-contained villages, which stifled individual development and social progress. In fact, Marx portrays the communal structures of these villages, which he erroneously sees as precluding the development of private property in land, as “the solid foundation of Oriental despotism” (MECW 12: 132). While he also begins to attack the “barbarism” of British colonialism, he still views that colonialism, in a rather unilinear fashion, as bringing about necessary if painful progress through modernization (MECW 12: 221).

Four years later, Marx begins to shift his position on India. In 1857, the anti-British Sepoy Uprising broke out, which led to two years of conflict in which the British almost lost control of the Indian Subcontinent. Marx enthusiastically supports the uprising, noting in dialectical fashion that the rebellious sepoy troops (British-trained Indian soldiers) were themselves a product of British colonialism: “There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself” (MECW 15: 353). For the next two years, also in the New York Tribune, he and Engels describe the Sepoy Uprising and its brutal suppression by the British. Contrasting the uprising in India to the relative quiescence of European labor at that time, Marx declares tellingly in an 1858 letter to Engels: “India is now our best ally” (MECW 40: 249). By now, he has assumed a more anti-colonialist position.

By the late 1850s, Marx also shifts his attitude toward China, now strongly supporting the Chinese during the Second Opium War (1856-60). Referring to the shelling of Canton [Guangzhou] harbor, he writes:

The unoffending citizens and peaceful tradesmen of Canton have been slaughtered, their habitations battered to the ground, and the claims of humanity violated, on the flimsy pretence that ‘English life and property are endangered by the aggressive acts of the Chinese!’ …These sweeping assertions are baseless. The Chinese have at least ninety-nine injuries to complain of to one on the part of the English. (MECW 15: 234)

As with India, Marx has moved toward a more anti-colonialist position.

In 1857-59, during the period of the Sepoy Uprising, Marx also elaborates a multilinear theory of history in the Grundrisse and the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. This constituted a revision of his earlier conceptualization of three successive modes of production: (1) the Greco-Roman slave-based “ancient” mode of production, (2) the medieval European serf-based “feudal” mode of production, and (3) the modern “bourgeois” mode of production, based on formally free wage labor. Referring mainly to India, Marx inserts alongside this Europe-based model an “Asiatic” mode of production, suggesting that precapitalist Asian societies had been on a different historical trajectory. Moreover, although the “Asiatic” mode of production was said to be based on a rather static form of communal property, Marx now no longer saw it as necessarily despotic, referring also to “democratic” forms of communal governance in precolonial societies (1973: 473).[2]

Marx picks up and develops these multilinear threads of argument in new ways during his last decade, 1872-83. Three strands of his writings are important here. The first of these strands is found in the changes he introduced to the 1872-75 French edition of Capital.  I confine myself here to one passage that bears on the issue of multilinearism and which cannot be found in standard English or German editions, this one from the section on primitive accumulation, where he discussed the origin of capitalism in the expropriation of the peasantry. In the standard English and German editions, Marx writes: “The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process…. Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic form” (Marx 1976: 876; emphasis added). However, in the later French edition, this passage reads: “But the basis of this whole development is the expropriation of the peasants. So far, it has been carried out in a radical manner only in England…. But all the countries of Western Europe are going through the same development” (Marx 1963: 1170-71; emphasis added). Here, he left room for an alternative development for societies outside Western Europe, including India, China, and Russia.[3]

The second strand in Marx’s late writings on non-Western and precapitalist societies concerns Russia. In several texts, Marx examined anew the issue of whether Russia and the other agrarian empires of Asia were inevitably destined to modernize in the Western capitalist manner. In an 1877 letter responding to a discussion of Capital by the Russian writer N.K. Mikhailovsky, Marx defended himself from the charge of unilinearism, in part by citing the French edition of Capital. He denied strongly that he had developed “a historico-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples” (Shanin 1983: 136). In his well-known 1881 letter to the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich, the topic was again whether Russia was destined to be swept into the pathway of capitalist development that was already taking place in Western Europe. Again, he concluded that alternate pathways of development might be possible. He based his judgment in large part upon the marked differences between the social structure of the Russian village, with its communal property, and the village under Western European feudalism’s somewhat more individualized property relations. He added that his recent studies of Russian society “convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for a social regeneration in Russia” (Shanin 1983: 124). In his far lengthier drafts for the letter to Zasulich, Marx indicated that versions of the communal social relations he was discussing in Russia could also be found in other non-Western societies such as India, but were not common in precapitalist Western Europe. In the 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels suggested that these communal social formations in Russia could form the starting point for a communist revolution, if they could link up with the revolutionary labor movement in the Western capitalist lands.

The third strand in Marx’s late writings on non-Western societies lies in his 1879-82 notebooks on colonialism, indigenous communal property, and gender in India, Indonesia, Algeria, Latin America, Egypt, and other non-Western and precapitalist societies, some of which have yet to be published but which I am helping to edit for the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe [Complete Writings]. Marx took extensive notes on the young Russian anthropologist Maxim Kovalevsky’s Communal Landownership, published in Russian in 1879, most of which is devoted to India. He also annotated the young British historian Robert Sewell’s Analytical History of India (1870). Marx’s notes on the Indian subcontinent from this period comprise nearly 90,000 words.

In his 1879 notes on Kovalevsky, Marx examines social relations, especially in terms of changes in the forms of communal property, across the entirety of Indian history, from (1) the period before the Muslim conquests, to (2) that of Muslim domination, and (3) that of British colonialism. Marx closely follows Kovalevsky’s historical typology of communal forms in rural India, which consisted of several stages, moving from clan or kin-based communities to village communities not organized around kinship that periodically redivided the common land on an equal basis. Marx also writes of social antagonisms, especially within the non-kinship based rural commune. Given this focus on broad changes in India’s communal forms, it would appear that precolonial India was for Marx no longer an “unchanging” society without any real history, as in 1853. The second part of Marx’s notes on Kovalevsky on India, which deals with the impact of Muslim rule on these earlier social relationships, calls forth a strong attack on the notion that precolonial India was feudal: Not only was he keeping away from such unilinear notions, as he had in the Grundrisse two decades earlier, but he was also explicitly attacking those like Kovalevsky who maintained the “feudal” interpretation.

On the other hand, Kovalevsky shared much of Marx’s hostility to colonialism, which became clear in the third section of Marx’s notes on Kovalevsky on India, where Marx focused on the rise of British colonial domination, up through the 1857-58 Sepoy Uprising. Marx strenuously attacks the “scoundrel” Cornwallis’s “permanent settlement” of 1793, which created capitalist-style landed property in Indian villages, at tremendous cost to the peasants (Marx in Krader 1975: 385). Calling the British colonialists “dogs,” “asses,” “oxen,” “blockheads,” and the like, Marx alludes to a “general hatred of the English government” (390-92, passim). Marx also celebrates the Sepoy Uprising once again. Finally, here following Kovalevsky’s data, Marx discerns the continuation of communal forms in the villages, underneath the more atomized capitalist structures introduced by the British: “Nevertheless between these atoms certain connections continue to exist, distantly reminiscent of the earlier communal village landowning groups” (388; emphasis in original). This suggests a link between Marx’s notes on India and his late writings on Russia, discussed above. If these communal relationships endured in India, might they not also, as in Russia, serve as points of resistance to capital? Marx answers this implicit query by indicating that it was not so much the preservation of these forms as their forceful dissolution in the name of “economic progress” that could unleash new social forces dangerous to British rule. The older communal forms may not have been revolutionary in and of themselves, but they could become a “danger” to the social order as they collided with capitalist modernity (394).

Marx supplements these anthropological studies with one on Indian political and military history in his notes on Sewell’s Analytical History of India. If the Kovalevsky notes suggest that Marx no longer saw India as a society without a history, those on Sewell suggest that a second problematic feature of the 1853 India writings was falling aside: the notion that India had responded passively to outside conquest. Again and again, Marx’s notes emphasize the contingent character of the Muslim and British conquests, rather than, as in 1853, the ineluctable march of large historical forces. At every stage, he now highlights indigenous Indian resistance to foreign conquest. For example, Marx records passages such as the following from Sewell, emphasizing how in 1704 the Hindu Maratha forces – based near present-day Mumbai (Bombay) – had put Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb on the defensive, this before the British had gained much of a foothold in India:

1704…. In the last 4 years of his life whole government disorganized; Marathas began to recover their forts and gather strength; a terrible famine exhausted the provisions for troops and drained the treasury; soldiers mutinous over want of pay; hard pressed by the Marathas [Mughal Emperor] Aurangzeb retreated in great confusion to Ahmadnagar. (Marx 1960: 43; emphasis in original; see also Sewell 1870: 66)

In another reference to the Marathas, Marx uses the word “clan ancestor [Stammvater]” in describing the Maratha leadership, thus highlighting the notion that the Marathas, who formed the most important locus of Indian resistance to both the Mughals and the British, were organized on a clan basis. None of the above is meant to suggest that Marx’s notes on India are anti-Muslim, for on numerous occasions, he notes the considerable contributions of Muslims to Indian culture and society. At one point, he writes that Mughal Emperor Akbar “made Delhi into the greatest and finest city then existing in the world” (Marx 1960: 33; emphasis in original). Marx portrays Akbar in a relatively secular light, characterizing him as “indifferent in religious matters, therefore tolerant” (32).

Marx devotes the bulk of the notes on Sewell to the period of British ascendancy, where he stresses the contingent character of Britain’s conquests, and the many instances in which its power in India hung by a thread. He frequently terms the British “blockheads” or “dogs,” whom he sometimes describes as terribly frightened in the face of Indian resistance. Throughout these notes, Marx shows a pronounced sympathy for the Marathas, while occasionally expressing disdain for their warlordism. The notes on Sewell suggest that Marx’s sympathy for the Sepoy Uprising had only increased since his New York Tribune articles on these same events during the late 1850s.

II. Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism: Poland, the US, and Ireland

In another set of writings spanning four decades, Marx examined the relationship of race, ethnicity, and nationalism to revolution, particularly in Poland, the US during the Civil War, and Ireland. These writings belie the notion that Marx’s conceptualization of capitalist modernity constitutes a “totalizing” grand narrative under which the particulars of race, ethnicity, and nation are subsumed.

Marx and Engels were always concerned with Polish national liberation, a cause warmly adopted by most of their generation of revolutionaries, who were outraged at the eighteenth-century partition of Poland by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, and who stood for Poland’s restoration as an independent nation. In the programmatic conclusion to the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels specifically supported the left wing of the Polish national movement: “In Poland [the communists] support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection in Cracow in 1846″ (MECW 6: 518). In February 1848, when revolution broke out in France once again, “Vive la Pologne” was a prominent slogan of the revolutionary movement, which saw Tsarist Russia as the most reactionary force in European politics, and Poland as a key ally.

Eight years later, in a letter to Engels of December 2, 1856, Marx calls support for Poland the “‘external’ thermometer” by which one could measure “the intensity and viability of all revolutions since 1789.” He adds: “This is demonstrable in detail from French history. It is conspicuous in our brief German revolutionary period, likewise in the Hungarian” (MECW 40: 85). Marx considered Poland to be a major positive factor in the international revolutionary movement, as seen in an 1875 speech, where he stressed the “cosmopolitan” character of Polish revolutionaries, by now including a reference to the Paris Commune. The Poles, he declared, are

the only European people that has fought and is fighting as the cosmopolitan soldier of the revolution. Poland shed its blood during the American War of Independence; its legions fought under the banner of the first French Republic; by its revolution of 1830 it prevented the invasion of France that had been decided by the partitioners of Poland; in 1846 in Cracow it was the first in Europe to plant the banner of social revolution; in 1848 it played an outstanding part in the revolutionary struggle in Hungary, Germany, and Italy; finally, in 1871 it supplied the Paris Commune with its best generals and most heroic soldiers. (MECW 24: 57-58; emphasis in original)

The above passages suggest that support for Poland was one of the political passions of Marx’s life.

Poland was also a major factor in the establishment of the First International in 1864. European labor networks supporting the 1863 Polish uprising against Russian occupation often intersected with those defending the U.S. against the threat of a British intervention on the side of the South during the Civil War. Marx summed this up in a letter to a family member of November 29, 1864 recounting the founding of the International:

In September the Parisian workers sent a delegation to the London workers to demonstrate support for Poland. On that occasion, an international Workers’ Committee was formed. The matter is not without importance because… in London the same people… by their monster meeting… prevented war with the United States. (MECW 42: 47; emphasis in original)

Despite this, debates over Poland soon broke out in the First International between Marx and the Proudhonists – a minority tendency in the socialist movement that sided with Russia and that opposed taking up Polish national emancipation inside the working class and socialist movement.

Marx’s discussions of Poland inside the International also addressed larger issues concerning the relationship of national liberation to social revolution. He argued that in three key periods – the French Revolution of 1789-94, the Napoleonic era, and the Revolution of 1830 – France had betrayed Poland. This was connected to a broader point, one aimed at future revolutionary movements in Europe. He argued that in betraying Poland, the French revolutionaries constricted or even destroyed themselves, leading to defeat by external enemies or to a too limited revolution at home, one that did not really uproot the old system. In short, he was suggesting that unless democratic and class struggles could link up with those of oppressed nationalities, both would fail to realize fully their aims, if not go down to defeat.

Marx’s writings on Poland are little known today, in no small part because the Stalinist apparatus never produced popular editions of these writings, as they did with those on the US Civil War and on Ireland.

Although widely available in English through the collection The Civil War in the United States (1937),[4] Marx’s Civil War writings have not received much discussion recently, despite his treatment in them of a hotly debated topic, the intersections of class and race. One the one hand, earlier Marxist thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Raya Dunayevskaya stressed these writings’ originality and their pertinence in intertwining the issues of race and class in American society. On the other hand, some like the erstwhile Marxist historian Eugene Genovese chided “the retreat of Marx, Engels, and too many Marxists into liberalism” when it came to the Civil War (1971: 327). In Genovese’s view, Marx’s “burning hatred of slavery and commitment to the Union cause interfered with his judgment” (1971: 321). In short, the Civil War writings did not conform to Genovese’s reductionist notions of Marxism and therefore were not Marxist!

Looking at these writings directly, one finds a wealth of insights into the dialectics of race and class. As early as a letter of December 28, 1846, Marx writes of the intimate connection between slavery and capitalism:

Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry…. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. (MECW 38: 101-2)

Marx also saw African Americans as important revolutionary subjects. On January 11, 1860, in the aftermath of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, he writes to Engels concerning this and the emancipation of the Russian serfs:

In my view, the most momentous thing happening in the world today is, on the one hand, the movement among the slaves in America, started by the death of Brown, and the movement among the slaves in Russia, on the other…. I have just seen in the Tribune that there was a new slave uprising in Missouri, naturally suppressed. But the signal has now been given. (MECW 41: 4)[5]

The following year, he begins to cover the US Civil War, which he sees as carrying the potential of a continuation of these slave insurrections.

Overall, Marx held to the view that poor and working-class whites had their class consciousness distorted by slavery and racism. After the war ended, Marx argued that the abolition of slavery had destroyed a major barrier to the development of class consciousness within the US working class, reporting in Capital, Vol. I:

In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin. However, a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery. (1976: 414)

Less known is the September 1865 Address of the First International to the notoriously racist President Andrew Johnson, which contained this prescient warning: “Let your citizens of to-day be declared free and equal, without reserve. If you fail to give them citizens’ rights, while you demand citizens’ duties, there will yet remain a struggle for the future which may again stain your country with your people’s blood” (General Council of the First International. Minutes. 1864-1866: 311-12).

Inside Britain, a fierce debate raged during the early years of the Civil War, 1861-62, over whether to side with the South in the name of “freedom of the seas” in response to the Union blockade of southern ports. Sometimes the issue was posed less ideologically and more openly as the need to maintain a supply of cheap cotton for British capital. In 1861-62, the British Establishment also charged that the war was not really about slavery, noting that Lincoln had not yet proclaimed abolition as a goal. In response, Marx noted repeatedly that the South had made slavery into a core principle of its constitution.

As Marx reported at great length, large meetings organized by British workers passionately opposed intervention, siding with the North despite the enormous economic hardships inflicted upon them by the layoffs resulting from curtailment of the cotton trade. Such sentiments were echoed throughout Western Europe because, he wrote, the emergent working class saw the US as the most democratic society of the time, virtually the only country where even white male workers enjoyed full suffrage:

The true people of England, of France, of Germany, of Europe, consider the cause of the United States as their own cause, as the cause of liberty, and … despite all paid sophistry, they consider the soil of the United States as the free soil of the landless millions of Europe, as their land of promise,[6] now to be defended sword in hand, from the sordid grasp of the slaveholder…. In this contest the highest form of popular self-government till now realized is giving battle to the meanest and most shameless form of man’s enslaving recorded in the annals of history. (MECW 19: 29-30)

In evoking this as a key example of proletarian internationalism, Marx at the same time strongly criticized Lincoln for his slowness to act against slavery and his early failure to allow Black troops to fight in the war.[7] At the same time, Marx disagreed with those on the left who saw no real difference between a capitalist North with its exploitation of labor and the slave plantations of the South.

As with their writings on the Civil War, the writings of Marx and Engels on Ireland have long been easily available through the volume Ireland and the Irish Question, published in 1972 as a successor to previous less comprehensive editions. As early as The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Engels singled out the special oppression of Irish immigrant labor in Britain.

During the 1850s, Marx wrote occasionally on Ireland, but it was soon after the founding of the International that the rise of the insurrectionary Fenian movement brought the issue of Ireland to the fore. In a letter to Engels of December 10, 1869, Marx wrote famously that he had changed his position on Ireland, revising his earlier view that British labor would form the vanguard of social revolution in Britain and Ireland:

For a long time, I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy…. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. This is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general. (MECW 43: 398)

Here, Marx’s reversal of his earlier positions is made quite explicit, but as I have been arguing, a similar evolution of his thinking was taking place concerning India and other non-Western societies.

During this period, he had been immersing himself in Irish history, writing voluminous notes on Irish-British relations, on the Irish peasantry, and on prehistoric Irish society and its communal social forms. These notebooks will eventually be published in the MEGA. An indication of their content with respect to early Irish communal forms can be found in a letter to Engels of May 11, 1870, where Marx quoted the German historian Ernst Wachsmuth:

The community of goods was accompanied by Celtic laxity in the marriage tie, already known in antiquity, at the same time, however, [as] voting rights for women in the tribal assembly…. The first chapter of the book on common law deals with women: “If his wife lay with another man and he beats her, he sacrifices his claim to indemnification…. Sufficient grounds for divorce for a wife were the man’s impotence, scabies, and bad breath.” (MECW 43: 515; emphasis in original)

Marx adds humorously: “Such gallant youngsters, these Celts!” (MECW 43: 516).

Marx’s writings on Ireland, especially those around 1870, constitute his most theoretically developed discussion of the interweaving of class with nationalism, race, and ethnicity – a discussion that began with his writings on Poland and on the American Civil War. Inside the International, Ireland was a major reason behind his break with the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who did not want the International to get involved in non-class issues like defense of Irish political prisoners. For his part, Marx thought that this issue was intimately connected to the class struggle in Britain. All of this led him to some important theoretical reflections.

Marx now saw the Irish independence struggle as deeply linked to the struggles of British workers against capital, as he wrote in a letter of November 29, 1869 to the German socialist Ludwig Kugelmann: “I have become more and more convinced – and the thing now is to drum this conviction into the English working class – that they will never do anything decisive here in England before they separate their attitude towards Ireland quite definitely from that of the ruling classes, and… make common cause with the Irish…. Every movement in England itself is crippled by the dissension with the Irish, who form a very important section of the working class in England itself” (MECW 43: 390).

Marx returned to these issues in the “Confidential Communication” of March 1870, a statement against Bakunin he drafted on behalf of the General Council of the International. English working-class consciousness, he wrote, was attenuated by anti-Irish prejudice, in a dynamic similar to that of white racism in the US: “The common English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages and the standard of life…. He views him similarly to how the poor whites of the Southern states of North America viewed black slaves. This antagonism among the proletarians of England is artificially nourished and kept up by the bourgeoisie. It knows that this split is the true secret of the preservation of its power” (MECW 21: 120; emphasis in original).

Moreover, the Irish independence struggle could be, he wrote in this polemic with Bakunin, the “lever” that could pry apart British and thus global capitalism as part of an international revolutionary struggle:

Although revolutionary initiative will probably come from France, England alone can serve as the lever for a serious economic Revolution…. It is the only country where the capitalist form, that is to say, combined labor on a large scale under the authority of capitalists, has seized hold of almost the whole of production…. The English have all the material conditions for social revolution. What they lack is a sense of generalization and revolutionary passion. It is only the General Council [of the International] that can provide them with this, that can thus accelerate the truly revolutionary movement in this country, and consequently everywhere…. If England is the bulwark of landlordism and European capitalism, the only point where official England can be struck a great blow is Ireland. (MECW 21: 118-19; emphasis in original).

The above referred to Ireland’s peasantry, whose opposition to the system was enhanced by a national factor, that the landlord class in Ireland was to a great extent British, not Irish. Ireland was also where the landed aristocracy, part of the British ruling class alongside the industrial capitalists, had important holdings.

III. Implications for Today

I have argued that Marx’s critique of capital was far broader than is usually supposed. To be sure, he concentrated on the labor-capital relation within Western Europe and North America. But at the same time, he expended considerable time and energy on the analysis non-Western societies, as well as on race, ethnicity, and nationalism in Western Europe and North America. These are problems of our time and it behooves us to stop attacking Marx for allegedly ignoring them. Moreover, it also behooves us to see what we can learn from the ways in which Marx never separated these questions from the critique of capital and at the same time, took each of them seriously as social factors.

Let us conclude with a few general comments on how the writings under consideration here illuminate more general issues in Marx’s work. One could say that he began with a somewhat one-sided appreciation of capitalist modernity, of its progressiveness. His writings on non-Western societies, particularly India and China, help us to problematize this aspect of his work. At the same time, these writings help us to discern a larger issue, his growing hostility to capitalist modernity, as he moved from the fulsome praise of capitalist modernity in the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto, to an appreciation in the Grundrisse of capital’s role in building up the productive forces of society, to the much harsher critique of modernity elaborated in Capital. This is especially true of the discussion of commodity fetishism in Capital, where human relations are seen as relations between things because that is “what they really are” under capitalism (Marx 1976: 166). It is also true of the chapter on machinery, where he argues that the most modern forms of technology (as of the 1870s) only served to deepen the exploitation and alienation of the worker.

Several more specific implications for today of Marx’s writings discussed here should also be considered: (1) Marx’s general dialectic is not one of abstract universalism but has plenty of room for the specificities of nation, ethnicity, and race, issues on which he makes important and original contributions. (2) Especially in his later writings, Marx theorizes indigenous forms of resistance to capital and their need to connect to the working classes of more technologically developed sectors (and vice versa). The persistence of these issues can be seen most prominently in parts of Latin America today. (3) Marx’s theorization of race, ethnicity and nationalism in relation to class and to revolution remains very relevant today, as seen in the struggles inside the urban ghettoes and prisons of the US and Western Europe.

References:

Anderson, Kevin. 2010. Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.

General Council of the First International. Minutes. 1864-1866. 1962. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Genovese, Eugene. 1971 [1968]. “Marxian Interpretations of the Slave South.” In In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History. New York: Pantheon: 315-53.

Krader, Lawrence. 1975. The Asiatic Mode of Production: Sources, Development and Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx. Assen: Van Gorcum.

Marx, Karl. 1960. Notes on Indian History (664-1858). Moscow: Progress Publishers.

_______. 1972. On America and the Civil War. Vol. II of the Karl Marx Library, ed. and trans. by Saul K. Padover. New York: McGraw-Hill.

_______. 1973. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin.

_______. 1963. Oeuvres, Vol. I. Ed. Maximilien Rubel. Paris: Gallimard.

_______. 1976. Capital, Vol. I. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin.

_______. 2008. Capital, Vol. 1. Trans. into Persian by Hassan Mortazavi, with Kaveh Boveiri. Tehran, Iran: Agah Publishing.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1937. The Civil War in the United States. Edited and introduced by Richard Enmale [Richard Morais]. New York: International Publishers.

_______. 1972. Ireland and the Irish Question. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

MECW: Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1975-2004. Collected Works. Fifty volumes. New York: International Publishers.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

Sewell, Robert. 1870. Analytical History of India. London: W. H. Allen & Co.

Shanin, Teodor, ed. 1983. Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the ‘Peripheries’ of Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

[1] For reasons of space, I have largely eschewed references to the wide-ranging commentaries on Marx on the issues under discussion here. These and other related issues are discussed in my Marx at the Margins (2010).

[2] Although this was a multilinear theory of history, it said nothing about contemporary societies like India and China under the impact of capitalism and colonialism.

[3] Few editions of Capital – and none in English — take these textual variants seriously.

One exception is the recent Persian translation, which carries the alternate texts from the French edition as marginal notes (Marx 2008). Primary translator Hassan Mortazavi’s introduction is available in English:
http://iranianvoicesintranslation.blogspot.com/2009/07/translators-preface-to-new-persian.html

[4] See also the non-Marxist Saul Padover’s collection, often translated with greater fluidity (Marx 1972).

[5] Although I refer to the standard edition of this letter in MECW, I have altered the translation after consulting the German original. I will do so occasionally below with respect to texts originally written in German or French.

[6] Elsewhere, especially in Capital, he took up the brutal massacre of the indigenous population by the American colonists, an issue not addressed here.

[7] In a letter to Engels of August 7, 1862 that was marred by the use of the n-word (in English in the midst of a German sentence), Marx hit out strongly on this point: “A single nigger-regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves” (MECW 41: 400). This is an instance of Marx using a racist phrase to make an anti-racist point. This use of the n-word was revealed to readers of English in Padover’s edition (Marx 1972) and was subsequently included in MECW; it had been rendered as “Negro” in Marx and Engels (1937).

GENERAL STRIKE IN SPAIN

Strikes and other mass actions also took place other European countries on September 29.

In Greece, which experienced a near-insurrection earlier this year against draconian austerity measures enacted after a near collapse of state finances, mass strikes shut down public transport on September 29.

In Ireland, mass actions also took place, with a cement truck — bearing the sign “toxic bank” — blocking the gates of the Irish parliament to protest the fact that the Irish people are being forced to repay $97 billion in bad loans taken on by the Anglo-Irish bank.  The bank had been in the hands of private capital until the crisis, when the state took it over along with its massive debts.

In Portugal, tens of thousands mobilized against austerity measures by the social democratic government, with unions announcing a general strike for November 24.

In Slovenia, state workers launched a strike to protest plans for a two-year wage freeze.

Even in relatively conservative Lithuania, some 400 workers defied legal prohibitions to rally against harsh austerity measures.

But it was in Spain that the September 29 mobilization reached its greatest dimensions, with millions of workers taking part in the country’s first general strike since 2002.  The strike was centered in the industrial sector, with factories, construction, and energy among the areas hardest hit, while state workers participated at a somewhat smaller level.

Large numbers of workers took to the streets of Madrid, where their picket lines blocked delivery trucks to vegetable markets, with police arresting some strikers.  Workers also marched through the streets of downtown Madrid, attempting to shut down shops and banks.  In Barcelona, demonstrators from far leftist groups clashed with the police, as a police car burned and several dozen demonstrators were arrested.

Overall, the strike in Spain revealed a deep chasm between the working class and the social democratic government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, which its votes have up to now maintained in power.  With Spain under fire by international capital, which warns that its public debt level could lead to a Greece-style collapse, Zapatero has deeply angered workers by caving in.  He has been slashing pensions and social benefits.  He has also been planning to make it easier for workers to be fired, this at a time when the official unemployment rate still stands at 20%.

On the one hand, the September 29 general strike in Spain illustrated the mobilizing power of the large trade unions, which have roots in the left and the struggle against fascism.  On the other hand, it revealed the bureaucratic character of these same labor unions, which had postponed the strike from June to September, and which also made an agreement in advance with the government to make sure the strike did not disrupt public services too much.

THE SEPTEMBER 7 STRIKE IN FRANCE

It is in France, however, that this fall’s European strikes have had the greatest impact.  French workers have succeeded in developing a massive and persistent anti-austerity movement in the face of one of the most reactionary governments in Europe, that of Nicolas Sarkozy.

The serial strikes and demonstrations, beginning with a one-day general strike on September 7, have constituted one of the largest outpourings on the part of French labor in recent decades.  Coming on the heels of the much more militant Greek mass actions earlier in the year, the French events show that mass discontent on the part of labor is not limited to a few countries on the brink of financial bankruptcy, but extends to the larger and supposedly more successful capitalist economies as well.

As in Greece and elsewhere, the immediate focal point of the French strikes has been a government plan to drastically reduce retirement benefits by forcing workers to work longer, by raising the age for a minimum pension from 60 to 62, and for a full pension from 65 to 67.  In brutal fashion, the new law proposed by Sarkozy made no exceptions for occupations involving hard physical labor, where many workers will now be forced to toil nearly 50 years to receive a full pension.  Last spring, two large strikes had already signaled labor’s intention to oppose these measures.

The September 7 French strikes involved between 1 and 3 million people, according to the authoritative newspaper Le Monde.  Much of the national commuter and long distance rail system shut down, as did the ports of Marseille and Le Havre, the country’s largest. Most hospitals, schools, and childcare centers were also closed by the strike, while production was severely curtailed at major oil refineries and electric power plants.  Paris subway workers kept the trains running so people could get to the mass demonstration, which drew hundreds of thousands onto the streets. Proportionally even greater numbers turned out in smaller cities: about 70,000 in Bordeaux, about 100,000 in Marseille, and about 25,000 in Lille.

Moreover, according to a respected public opinion poll taken on the eve of the September 7 strike, some 78% of the French public regarded it as “justified.”  Bitter irony was expressed against Labor Minister Eric Woerth, the point man for the new pension reductions, as he is currently under police investigation for his role in a major corruption scandal involving clandestine funding of the conservative parties by Liliane Bettencourt, heir to the L’Oréal cosmetics fortune.  Meanwhile, Sarkozy’s approval rate has dropped to 31% according to the same public opinion polls.

PERSISTENCE OF THE FRENCH STRIKES

In mid-September, Sarkozy pushed his retrogressive retirement law through the National Assembly without any changes or negotiations with labor, although it still had to go through the Senate, with debate scheduled for October.

With their base undeterred and the French public dismayed by Sarkozy’s refusal to negotiate a single concession, the unions launched a second one-day general strike on September 23.  Again, between 1 and 3 million workers participated.  Although the government claimed that participation had decreased slightly, the unions claimed the opposite, and it was generally recognized that the turnout was basically the same as on September 7.  Slogans sometimes took on a mocking character, as in a sign that read, “Work less and live better,” satirizing Sarkozy’s campaign slogan, “Work more, earn more.” The humorous slogan about working less, which was put forth by anarcho-syndicalists, also had a serious side, the centuries-old fight by labor to cut the duration of work in response to the vast development of the productive forces by capital.

On September 23, new sectors of the population took a greater part in the one-day strike, as seen in the large turnout in smaller towns and cities. High school and university students also participated in greater numbers.  Student and youth activists pointed out that one effect for them of raising the retirement age would be fewer jobs for youth, as older workers would then stay on the job, this at a time when France’s youth unemployment rate stands officially at 24%.

By this time, dissension was breaking out inside the labor movement, with more militant unionists demanding an “unlimited” general strike if Sarkozy kept up his refusal to negotiate.  More conservative labor leaders wanted to ease the pressure by holding a demonstration on a Saturday rather than another strike during the workweek. France’s most powerful union, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), a leftist union with roots in the Communist Party, went along with the more conservative unions, over the objections of many of its members. This resulted in the mass demonstrations of Saturday, October 2, which again brought out between 1 and 3 million people, this time in street rallies rather than work stoppages.  And again, Sarkozy government tried to claim – against all evidence – that the movement was dissipating.

In the aftermath of October 2, some sectors of labor, most prominently the CGT branches representing transit and subway workers in the Paris region, announced that they would stage rolling strikes beginning on October 12, during the time that the Senate would be debating the retirement law.   By October 10, however, the Senate had rushed to pass – albeit narrowly – the 3 main planks of Sarkozy’s pension cuts:  raising the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62, raising the age for a full pension from 65 to 67, and raising the minimum number years of work required for a full pension from 40.5 to 41.5.  It still had to be put together as a whole and sent back to the National Assembly for a final vote there, probably in November.

October 12 proved to be the largest mobilization yet, as even the government grudgingly admitted.  Between 1.2 and 3.5 million people took part in the strikes and demonstrations.  In Paris alone, up to 300,000 demonstrated in the streets, among them a large contingent of students.  This led the government to attack the movement for “sending 15-year-olds into the streets.”  The National Union of French Students retorted that Sarkozy’s pension cuts would eliminate a million jobs for the youth.  At the Paris demonstration, some workers called for an “insurrectional strike” that would force the government to negotiate by shutting off oil supplies.  Also in Paris, the new women’s group “Dare to Be Feminist!” – an organization formed last year in response to funding cuts to family planning programs — assumed a prominent place in the demonstration. Feminists have been pointing out that working women will suffer the most from the changes in the retirement law, given how most women leave the labor force for a significant part of their adult lives and thus do not accumulate enough years in the system to receive a full pension, even under the present system.

By this time, dockworkers had shut down the Port of Marseille, the country’s largest, over a separate set of issues surrounding a plan to restructure and reduce the workforce. In that city, around 150,000 had participated in a demonstration during the October 12 strike. By October 12-13, 11 of the 12 oil refineries on French soil were inoperative, due to lack of supplies and to the strikes against Sarkozy’s pension cuts.  Fairly substantial strikes still gripped other sectors by October 13 as well, among them public transport and schools.  Another large set of demonstrations was scheduled for Saturday, October 16.

OBSTACLES FACING LABOR AND THE LEFT

The September-October strikes in France are comparable to those of 1995, after which the government shelved an earlier set of austerity measures.  This year’s strikes had a different tone, however, than those in 1995.  With a hard-right government in power, there was from the beginning far less of a sense that Sarkozy could be made to retreat in the face of mass protests. As mentioned above, Sarkozy pushed the new retirement law through the National Assembly shortly after the September 7 strike, in clear defiance not only of labor, but also of public opinion. And he got most of it through the Senate by October 10.  A few last-minute changes that eased the pension criteria for parents of the disabled and mothers of three or more children were so small that they only accentuated the utter intransigence of the government in the face of massive popular protests.

How has the government gotten away with this in the face of both organized labor and public opinion, as manifested in several days of massive strikes and street protests?   Part of the answer lies in the way in which Sarkozy has attempted to maintain support by whipping up hatred against immigrants and ethno-religious minorities.  These were the same tactics that brought him to power in 2007, when he campaigned on the slogan of using a heavy-duty cleansing machine to clean up the “scum” in France’s minority communities.  The youth of these communities in the suburbs of Paris and other large cities had been staging protests against police killings that involved the torching of hundreds of automobiles.  In his 2007 campaign and since, Sarkozy has tapped into the support base of the anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic National Front, a neo-fascist movement that has sometimes scored 20% or higher in national elections, with the rest of the electorate often pretty evenly divided between the traditional right — out of which Sarkozy emerged — and leftist parties.  These not very subtle appeals to the neo-fascist vote have increased the electoral base of the rightist parties that back Sarkozy.

Sarkozy took three specific racist actions this summer in an attempt to stave off mounting popular anger over the economy and his austerity measures.  First, the government rounded up hundreds of Roma, deporting them summarily to Romania.  So blatant was the racism of this action that France is now under investigation by the European Union.  Second, Sarkozy pushed through parliament a law banning the wearing of the full-face veil in public, not merely in public buildings or schools, but even on the streets.  On this one, the pusillanimous parliamentary leftists – Socialists and Communists – abstained, when they didn’t back this bit of demagoguery outright.  This new law was quickly upheld by the Constitutional Court, which at nearly the same time decided against allowing gay and lesbian couples to adopt children.  Third, Sarkozy has proposed a law mandating that French citizens of immigrant origin involved in violent altercations with the police would be stripped of their citizenship and deported to their birthplace, even if they came to France as a small child.  He got this one through the National Assembly on October 12, the very day of the mass strikes.  All of these measures played to popular fear and hatred of the “other.”

But despite this racist demagoguery, Sarkozy has continued to lose public support over the summer and into the fall, while the strikes and demonstrations against the pension plan have enjoyed massive and growing popular support.  Therefore, the answer to Sarkozy’s success in pushing through his anti-labor measures must involve something else as well.

Some have noted that as French unions have declined in strength in recent decades, the tactic of mass mobilization on the streets has increasingly replaced the mass strike that used to shut down economic activity more completely.  This is certainly an objective fact that shows the weakened power of labor, in a period when the relative number of production workers in France has declined, as industrial production has shifted to low-wage societies like China and India.

But there is a subjective factor to be considered here as well. What has also declined drastically in recent decades is the belief – once widespread among large sections of the French working classes and the intellectuals — that a radical uprooting of capitalism is not only theoretically possible, but also achievable.  In the present atmosphere, influenced by the collapse of a misguided (but for many years widespread) belief that the totalitarian state-capitalist systems of the USSR or China represented positive alternatives, the notion that there is no alternative to the rule of capital has become hegemonic.  Until that vicious ideological circle is broken, labor and the left will remain stuck.

(We should not idealize those earlier days, however, when the Communist Party-run CGT cloaked its concessions to capital and the state in Marxist, even revolutionary language.  This was seen in 1968, when the CGT maneuvered to derail a massive anti-systemic student-worker uprising in favor of a large pay raise for workers and new elections.  While some independent leftist currents grew in response to the betrayal of 1968, the Maoists grew even more, until their popularity among students and intellectuals crashed during the mid-1970s, to be replaced by anti-Marxist theories like the New Philosophy and the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault.)

Thus, while French workers have demonstrated en masse against Sarkozy, and the public has supported them, there is also a sense of weary inevitability surrounding the policies of this reactionary politician, who functions, in large part, as the personification of capital in this particular society at this particular moment.  The same is true, albeit with local variations, in the other European countries that have experienced serious labor unrest in recent months.

[This article was published in US Marxist-Humanists on October 13, 2010]

Los Angeles, CA — Protestors demonstrated on the streets and clashed with police after the September 5 police killing – in broad daylight – of Manuel Jamines, a day laborer. Tragically, Jamines, a Guatemalan immigrant originally from an indigenous community, was fluent in neither English nor Spanish.  Thus, he may not have understood the 3 bicycle police from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) who confronted him that afternoon.

Why Lethal Force?

Community members from the Westlake neighborhood, which is heavily populated by Central American immigrants, demanded to know why lethal force had been used on a drunken and staggering man who – according to police – came toward them while waving a small knife at 3 police carrying firearms.

Moreover, a local witness denied that Jamines was armed:  “A Westlake resident who said she witnessed the LAPD’s fatal shooting of a Guatemalan day laborer said Thursday she saw no knife in the man’s hands, contradicting the Police Department’s account. ‘He had nothing in his hands,’ said Ana, who did not give her last name and asked that her face be obscured on photos and on television because she feared being harassed by the police. ‘At the moment when the police were shooting, he had nothing.’ ….She said the man appeared drunk, and was having trouble keeping his balance. He stepped toward the officers, but it appeared to be an attempt to keep from falling forward, she said. Ana said she gestured to the man from across the street, trying to get him to turn around and let police arrest him.”

“Ana, who works in a school cafeteria, said she has lived in the neighborhood for 30 years and believes that police have been over-aggressively cracking down on street vendors and seizing their products.”  (Victoria Kim, “Victim of LAPD’s fatal shooting in Westlake was unarmed, witness says,” LA Times, 9/10/10)

Ana’s point about the crackdown on street vendors illustrated some of the underlying class and ethnic tensions in a community that has experienced poverty, racism, and police brutality for decades.

Challenging the LAPD

Beginning on the night of September 6, and for several nights afterwards, hundreds of demonstrators massed outside a branch station of the Rampart Division of the LAPD.  On the evening of September 7, some 300 protestors gathered outside the station, where they clashed with police.  Police thereupon declared an unlawful assembly, and arrested 22 people.

On the evening of September 8, a meeting was scheduled by the authorities, where LAPD Chief Charlie Beck was to speak to the community. Before the meeting began, young protestors skirmished with police in riot gear, also dumping trash on the streets to block police vehicles.  Some demonstrators shouted “pigs” at police, who threatened them with rifles.

Even to get inside the meeting, which was held at a local school, community residents had to pass through an intimidating phalanx of riot police who searched and checked them for weapons. KPCC Radio (National Public Radio) reporter Shirley Jahad likened this to “a militarized force” that created severe obstacles to attending the meeting. No signs or banners were allowed inside.  Despite this atmosphere of intimidation, 300 very angry people made their way inside.

At the meeting, Beck was roundly booed and heckled as he tried to justify the shooting.  Some shouted, “Killers! Assassins!” at police.  According to Jahad, police displayed an enlarged photo of the knife in order to exaggerate the threat Jamines posed before they killed him. Beck admitted openly that the LAPD has no policy of disarming someone with a knife; nor does it have a policy of shooting to wound rather than to kill.  He also admitted that bicycle officers do not have non-lethal weapons like teargas – too heavy to carry, he said.

Community speakers demanded a thorough investigation, but expressed doubts that this would occur. “Transparency for us means members of the community should be part of the investigation as well,” said Juan Acano, a Westlake community worker. “The community spoke tonight. There are many that want to be part of the process, not just me,” as reported in Neon Tommy, a progressive news outlet at University of Southern California.

The Real Grassroots

The location of this latest police killing offered a dramatic illustration of the class/race chasm dividing US society:  It took place at the corner of 6th Street and Union Ave., just across the 110 Freeway from the shimmering high-rise office buildings of downtown LA.

Westlake is a center of Central American immigrants, many of them Salvadoran and Guatemalan. The community has a long history of struggles against police crackdowns on street vendors, which have intensified this summer, especially on nearby Alvarado Street. This has stoked tensions at a time when unemployment levels in minority communities like Westlake stand at catastrophic levels.  Overall, the official unemployment rate in Los Angeles County stood at 12.3% in June 2010, three times what it was in 2006-07, before the Great Recession. And it is probably more than 25% in communities like Westlake.

The police killing in Westlake is a continuation of decades of subjugation at the hands of police and power structure that they represent.  MacArthur Park, only 5 blocks from the September 5 killing, is where the LAPD brutally attacked thousands of immigrant rights demonstrators on May 1, 2007.

Westlake is also part of the notorious Rampart Division of the LAPD, where in the 1990s police from an anti-gang unit assassinated unarmed gang members and engaged in other criminal acts.  This resulted in the Rampart scandal, during which some 70 police officers were implicated in various forms of misconduct toward civilians.

Earlier, during the 1992 LA Rebellion, dozens of buildings were burned and stores looted in Westlake and its environs.

Above all, the Westlake police killings and resultant community response illuminate the lived situation and the thinking of one of the most oppressed layers of the population, part of a group that is undergoing untold suffering during the Great Recession.  This, and not the middle class anti-tax protestors who have gained so much media attention, is the real grassroots of US society, which its dominant classes ignore at their peril.

This article originally appeared in US Marxist-Humanists on September 23, 2010

The views set out in our Statement of Principles and our commitment to the dialectics of revolution place us in conflict with the dominant philosophical perspectives, even on the Left. Two of these dominant perspectives on the Left are:  (1) the tradition of democracy and civil society that emerged in the 1980s as a rejection of revolution and of Marxism and with which are associated thinkers like Jürgen Habermas; (2) the traditions of autonomous Marxism and postcolonialism, which are associated with thinkers like Antonio Negri and Edward Said.   The first of these trends is influential in the mass democratic movement in Iran today, while the second is influential in the anti-globalization movement. — Editors

I. Introduction: The Philosophical, the Political, and the Organizational

We gather here this weekend to found the International Marxist-Humanist Organization.  This action is unprecedented in the history of the Left.  We are committed to working out philosophically and putting into practice a real alternative to this moribund capitalist system whose stench has become unbearable, whether that coming from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, from the killing fields of Afghanistan and Iraq, or from the torture chambers of Iran.  And we are committed to doing so as an international organization with a unified set of philosophical, political, and organizational principles, rooted in the writings and organizational practice of our founder, Raya Dunayevskaya.

Philosophically, as our Statement of Principles sets forth, “we base ourselves on the totality of Marx’s Marxism, 1841-1883. In particular, we stand on the philosophical new beginnings articulated in Marx’s 1844 Humanist Essays, especially the ‘dialectic of negativity as a moving and creating principle’.”  This type of grounding in the whole of Marx’s thought, including the 1844 Humanist Essays, might sound self-evident to us, but virtually no other socialist organizations anywhere would take such a position.  And as we know, Marx’s statement praising the “dialectic of negativity” is a tribute to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and in that sense, we are Hegelian Marxists as well as Marxist-Humanists.  This is what we are philosophically, but the Statement of Principles goes on to concretize this further in terms of what we are not: “Alternatives such as post-modernist thought and pragmatism cannot fundamentally challenge the realities of globalised capitalism. But an adequate response to these alternatives cannot be based on forms of post-Marx Marxism that allow particularity and difference to be skipped over or ignored. New human relations, what Marx first called a new Humanism, can be achieved when we restate, develop, and concretise Marx’s Marxism for our time as a dialectical, critical concept of ‘revolution in permanence.’ That creative dialectic needs to spell out what we are for, and our positive humanist vision, rather than the mere rejection of the present capitalist order, a rejection that lacks such a dialectical ‘positive in the negative’.” [For the full text of our Statement of Principles, see,  http://www.usmarxisthumanists.org/announcements/announcing-a-new-formation-the-international-marxist-humanist-organization]

Politically, we have firmly opposed capitalism in its various forms, whether private or state, while also supporting a whole range of emancipatory movements.  In our Principles, we write: “We oppose this capitalist, racist, sexist, heterosexist, and class-based society. We strive to foster the firmest unity among the forces of revolution and opposition to the established order: rank-and-file workers; oppressed nationalities and ethnic groups; women; lesbian-bisexual-gay-transgender people; students and youth; all of those people who are deeply disaffected and alienated from the established order who realize that a revolutionary transformation of society is necessary to create a truly human world.”  We do so even when those go against the grain of the established Left.  The IMHO Principles give specific examples that help define us further, again showing what we are by pointing to what we are not: “We also oppose reactionary forms of anti-imperialism whether based in religious fundamentalism, narrow nationalism, or military-populism. We opposed the first Iraq War of 1991 while at the same time supported the freedom movement of the Kurdish people. During the 1990s, we supported Bosnia-Herzegovina’s struggle for a multiethnic society in the face of Serbian genocide, the struggle of Chiapas in the face of globalised capitalism, and the independence movements of Kosova and Aceh. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks we have opposed the U.S. doctrine of permanent war while supporting both the antiwar movement and the freedom struggles of Iraqi, Iranian and Afghan women. We have supported the Palestinian national liberation movement while also supporting Israel’s right to exist within the pre-June 1967 borders, and at the same time opposing and exposing all forms of religious fundamentalism and narrow nationalism.”

Organizationally, we stand for the unity of philosophy and organization at all times, here following the pathway laid down by Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S.  After referring to her major writings and their core themes, our Principles state:  “Dunayevskaya’s 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes and her notes for an unfinished book on Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy (1986-87) offer crucial direction for organisation today. In looking at the history of revolutions and revolutionary movements, Dunayevskaya critiqued the limitations of both the vanguard party and the spontaneous forms emerging from below. She also pointed to the inadequacy of a committee form of organisation, which has not been able to transcend the limitations of the vanguard party as long as it has remained separated from dialectical philosophy.”  Here again, examples of what we are against will offer some clarification of what we are.  On the one hand, we have rejected those who have turned Marxist-Humanism into an eclecticism that hides its failure to concretize Marxism for our times behind incantatory quotes from Dunayevskaya.  On the other hand, we have rejected the attempt to ground a viable Marxist-Humanist organization in an ever-narrower set of formalistic rules about organizational structure that crowds out the philosophical-political grounding necessary to any serious Marxist organization.  [For more discussion on these latter points see Peter Hudis, “Towards an Organizational History of the Philosophy of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S.” (2009)]

Our attempt to work this all out in practice, both the practice of activism and the practice of philosophical-political discussion and creation, is an audacious challenge to a world where, even on the Left, the type of dialectics of revolution we espouse is often rejected, and where the type of dialectics of organization and philosophy we are working out is often off the agenda completely.  Today I want to underline some of the challenges to our form of dialectics of revolution, particularly those coming from two different philosophical directions:  (1) the tradition of democracy and civil society that emerged in the 1980s as a rejection of revolution and of Marxism and with which are associated thinkers like Jürgen Habermas; (2) the traditions of autonomous Marxism and postcolonialism, which are associated with thinkers like Edward Said and Antonio Negri.   The first of these trends is influential in the mass democratic movement in Iran today, while the second is influential in the anti-globalization movement.

II. Habermas, Iran and the “Self-Limiting Revolution”

In the 1980s, under the impetus of the failed revolutionary movements of the 1960s, the growth of the Green parties in Western Europe, and the emergence of the Solidarnosc labor union in Poland, prominent former Marxists like the German critical theorist Jürgen Habermas began to attack Marxism and specifically Marxist humanism as a utopian philosophy that leads, at best, toward misguided and impractical politics, and at worst, toward totalitarianism. The Polish philosopher and former Marxist humanist Leszek Kolakowski termed this Marx’s Promethean humanism, which he did not mean as a compliment: “The Promethean idea which recurs constantly in Marx’s work is that of faith in man’s unlimited powers as self-creator… and the belief that the man of tomorrow will derive his ‘poetry’ from the future” (Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. I, p. 412).  The Habermasian philosopher Albrecht Wellmer, who in an earlier period carried on a dialogue with Dunayevskaya, issued a virulent attack on Marxist-Humanism that tapped into a similar conceptual universe:  “So-called Marxist Humanism allowed no separation from the utopian horizons of Marxist theory and practice… There is an internal relation between the utopian horizon of Marxist theory and the repressive practice of actually existing [Stalinist] socialism” (Endspiele, 1993, p. 82)

This kind of thinking is diametrically opposed to our critique of Stalinist totalitarianism, which Dunayevskaya theorized as a technocratic state-capitalism that pushed aside the human person in a relentless quest for capital accumulation and rapid industrialization no matter what the cost.

Ideas have consequences.  As Dunayevskaya underlined, they not only respond to mass movements from below, but they also help to shape them.  We know the result in this case: During the decade of the 1980s, and under the relentless pressure of a mass workers movement and the critical intellectuals allied with it, the Polish Stalinist system finally gave way.  The intellectuals who provided philosophical and political guidance to the labor resistance had by then concluded that one must give up the idea of revolution and instead embrace incremental change, or as it was called in Poland in the 1980s, a self-limiting revolution.  This meant that one should assist in the formation a social movement, in this case a labor movement, but not attempt to overthrow state power. The end result was a Western-style privatized capitalism that promptly laid off most of the shipyard workers who had been the backbone of the democratic movement.

During the past 15 years, Iran has been in constant turmoil, as Islamic reformists, feminists, students, and workers have challenged the repressive theocracy.  In addition, in a society where philosophy looms large in the general culture, a number of more-or-less secular philosophical currents rooted in various schools, from Habermas to Hegel to Popperian scientific positivism — and occasionally, forms of independent Marxism including Marxist-Humanism as well — have interacted with currents of opposition.  During the period 1997-2005, when Iran experienced a cultural opening, it was no coincidence that of the prominent Western philosophers who came to speak in Tehran, it was Habermas who drew the largest audience when he spoke at Tehran University in 2002.  Thus, it was not inappropriate for Danny Postel to refer to one of Habermas’s famous works in the title of his book, Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran (2006). To be sure, either Habermasian critical theory or Popperian liberalism, with their evocation of critical reason, at least give intellectuals and youth some tools with which to challenge clerical dogmatism.  But they do not offer grounds for the type of revolutionary change that is needed today in Iran, or the world, for that matter.

The possibility of a revolution against the clerical regime in Iran burst out into the open in June 2009, with the mass democratic movement that began as a protest against the blatantly rigged re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  From the beginning we supported this movement, while also doing battle with those on the Left in the West who minimized this movement or worse, attacked it as playing into the hands of imperialism. I won’t waste any time on the likes of them today.

[In our June 19, 2009 “Preliminary Statement on the Upheaval in Iran,” issued by both the U.S. Marxist-Humanists and the Hobgoblin group in London, we stated:  “As Marxist-Humanists, we urge anti-capitalists the world over to solidarize with the Iranian people in their hour of struggle. Support the Iranian youth, women, workers, and other citizens in their freedom struggles! Do not be taken in by the reactionary anti-imperialism of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei!”   http://www.usmarxisthumanists.org/articles/preliminary-statement-on-the-upheaval-in-iran/]

[In our September 18, 2009 statement “Support the Iranian People’s Movement against the Repressive Regime!” issued by the U.S. Marxist-Humanists, the Hobgoblin group in London, and Marxist-Humanists in Canada, India, and West Africa, we stated:

“Unfortunately, some parts of the global Left have betrayed the Iranian people in their hour of need by supporting Ahmadinejad, among them Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and the Marxist journal Monthly Review.  These leftists claim that since the regime is resisting Western imperialism, it is deserving of our support.  They have also dismissed the mass actions of Iran’s youth, women, workers, and intellectuals as an isolated middle class movement.  We condemn these falsehoods that serve to mask the oppressive and exploitative reality of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”  http://www.usmarxisthumanists.org/articles/support-the-iranian-peoples-movement-against-the-repressive-regime/]

What I would like to do is to flesh out a bit what we mean when we say that our stance toward the Iranian democratic movement – the largest and most sustained progressive mass movement anywhere in the world today, and one in which feminists have played the most prominent role ever in such a movement – is nonetheless one of critical rather than uncritical support.  To be sure, we salute the movement, whose members and leaders are undergoing horrific executions and torture even now.  And although the top leadership has not (yet) been arrested, they have suffered severely nonetheless, with a nephew of Mir Hussein Moussavi having been murdered by regime thugs, and a son of Mehdi Karroubi having been severely tortured.

It should be noted, however, that there is no evidence that the present leadership of the democratic movement in Iran has the intention, let alone the organization necessary to topple the regime.  Its top leaders, even the very outspoken and intransigent Mehdi Karroubi, make clear that they wish to stay within the bounds of the structures of the Islamic Republic and to reform those structures, not to overthrow them. Karroubi has made clear not only that he does not want a revolution, but also that he does not even want a general strike to support the demands of the protestors.  This was shown in a rare interview with him in September 2009:

“He ruled out as unwise more extreme actions such as general strikes.  ‘Common people would suffer at the end of the day,’ he said. ‘Our disputes are not so deep.  It is a dispute between members of a family.  So we do not need that scale of protest’” (Ramin Mostaghim and Borzou Daragahi, “Key Opposition Figure Stands His Ground in Iran,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2009, http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran-karroubi9-2009sep09,0,6445751.story)

To many supporters of the democratic movement, including a number of critical philosophers, this is not a problem, since they have defined the movement not as a revolution but a civil rights struggle.  In so doing, they have continued the type of perspective rooted in thinkers like Habermas or Popper that they have been developing since the 1990s.

During past revolutionary situations, establishment figures like Karroubi would, as expected, usually opt for reform rather than revolution.  But especially in a country like Iran, the question of what happens after the revolution is hardly an abstraction today.  For this is a country that directly experienced a major revolution in 1978-79.  The revolutionaries took power, but instead of liberating society from oppression, the subsequent victory of the clerics over the Left meant that Iran was transformed into an authoritarian theocracy. This has meant that even radical youth on the street battling the regime’s forces in 2009 were leery of the word “revolution.”  As a student protestor told Western reporters last summer: “We don’t want a revolution. We already had one of those and it didn’t work” (Robert F. Worth and Nazila Fathi, “Crackdown ‘Immoral,’ Opposition Says in Iran,” New York Times, 7/26/09 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/world/middleeast/26iran.html?scp=1&sq=&st=nyt).

This is the paradox and the tragedy of Iran today. It desperately needs a revolution to transform the Islamic Republic, since the regime leadership has not given way and has met the democratic movement with little but repression.  Moreover, a revolutionary situation, or something near to that, was in existence for much of 2009.  At the same time, however, the very idea of revolution is so discredited – in no small part due to recent philosophical debated — that this rejection of revolution weighs down the movement, preventing it from taking things to a conclusion.

All of this gives a new meaning to Dunayevskaya’s assertion in 1953 that Lenin “didn’t have Stalinism to overcome, when revolutions, transitions seemed sufficient to bring the new society. Now everyone looks at the totalitarian one-party state, that is the new that must be overcome by a totally new revolt in which everyone experiences ‘absolute liberation’” (“Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes,” in The Power of Negativity, 2002, p. 22).

But is such “absolute liberation” a real possibility?  According to the popular critical philosophers of today like Habermas, such attempts at “absolute liberation” are themselves the problem.  The hegemony of such philosophies has added a powerful new conceptual barrier to the needed Iranian revolution.

III.  The Lure of Foucault: Said, Negri, and the Dialectic

If the Habermasians criticize Marx for being too radical, for a Promethean humanism that seeks to fly too high, many other radical thinkers of today attack Marx from a different direction.  In these quarters it is said that the problem with Marx is not that he was too radical, but that he was not radical enough.  Some add that the truly radical thinkers are people like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, even Friedrich Nietzsche.  These critics – most famously the Palestinian literary theorist Edward Said in his Orientalism (1978) – have attacked Marx for adopting what they see as a unilinear model of development in the modernist mode.  (Postmodernists term this a grand narrative.)  Here, much of the debate has revolved around Marx’s early articles on India during the early 1850s. At a general level, it is said even more often among radical intellectuals today that Marx informs us on class and economic structures but that his theoretical model does not incorporate gender, race, ethnicity, or nationalism at all, or at least not very much.

Said wrote over three decades ago in his Orientalism that Marx in his 1853 writings on India held to the “ideal of regenerating a fundamentally lifeless Asia” by way of British colonialism (p. 154).  At first, Said continues, “Marx was still able to identify even a little with poor Asia” but this sentiment “disappeared as it encountered the unshakable definitions built up by Orientalist science” (p. 155).  Said concludes that “in article after article he returned with increasing conviction to the idea that even in destroying Asia, Britain was making possible there a real social revolution” (1978, p. 153, emphasis added).

To be sure, there are elements of Eurocentrism and even ethnocentrism in Marx’s 1853 writings on India.  But can we really agree with Said’s blanket denunciation of Marx and all European thought concerning the Middle East and Asia? “It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric” (p. 204). Said’s argument about “every European… a racist” is nothing short of the most crass cultural nationalism dressed up in sophisticated postmodernist language. As the Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad writes, “only the most obscurantist indigenists and cultural nationalists had previously argued… that Europeans were ontologically incapable of producing any true knowledge about non-Europe.  But Said was emphatic on this point” (In Theory, pp. 178-79).

Said’s blanket dismissal ignores Marx’s denunciations of British colonialism as a form of barbarism and his evocation of an independent India, already in 1853.  It ignores his firm support for the anti-British Sepoy Uprising four years later, when he termed the Indian people his “best allies” in the struggle against capital.  It ignores his overturning of the Eurocentric theory of 3 stages of precapitalist society – the primitive, slave, and feudal modes of production – in the Grundrisse (1857-58), by inserting alongside them an “Asiatic” mode of production. And it ignores Marx’s late writings on British colonialism and Indian resistance, by then seen as rooted in indigenous social structures in the villages.

I will not go into all this here, as you can read it in my Marx at the Margins.  But I will say that I think we have to confront these kinds of attacks on Marx head on, and answer them point-by-point, while also acknowledging that Marx’s writings on Asia were occasionally flawed.  Above all, we should not retreat behind generalities like supporting Marx’s method only, while adding that he was a man of the nineteenth century, etc.  To the contrary!  Developing Marxism for our time means confronting the whole of Marx’s work and re-examining it with the eyes to today in search of new points of departure, not for his sake but for ours.

One of the sources of Said’s flawed conceptualization of Marx, and ultimately of colonialism and racism as well, is his having rooted Orientalism in Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power.  Foucault rejected modern Western bureaucratic forms of power so vehemently that he refused to see any progress resulting from the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth century. In terms of the subsequent leftist opposition to the new capitalist order, he saw not only the trade union and socialist leaders from the nineteenth century onward as part of the system, but also the proletariat itself.  Where Marx and Lenin wrote about going “lower and deeper” to the rank-and-file workers, Foucault saw the entire working class as co-opted by the system.  He saw real resistance as coming from more marginalized groups like criminals, mental patients, and sexual minorities. Outside the West, although Said did not join him in this, Foucault came to support radical Islamism as a more powerful challenge to global power systems than Marxism, which he judged to be just another Western modernizing ideology.

Another Foucauldian notion – which Said incorporates only partially – is the idea that power is connected to a set of ideas and that it expresses itself not only from the top down – from the state, capital, or the police – but also from within subordinate groups as well.  As he wrote famously: “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (Discipline and Punish, p. 194).  This is directed in part against the Marxist concept of ideology, where ideology masks and justifies power and repression.  It also runs against Marx’s concept of alienation, for those subordinate here are not so much alienated as absorbed into the matrix of power.  What Said takes from all of this is the notion of “domains of objects and rituals of truth,” Foucault’s notion that a major aspect of the workings of power is that it creates new notions of truth and knowledge.  To Said, Western “Orientalist” writing on the Middle East and Asia, which he saw as consistently in the service of imperialism, was an example of such a formation of truth and knowledge tied to a power grid.

Said also writes that Orientalism – whether as scholarship or as literary writings — not only reflected imperialist sensibilities, but also was a major cause of imperialism itself.  Thus, in passages that would startle a historical materialist or even many Foucauldians, Said sees European racism and ethnocentrism toward the East as transhistorical and fixed structures.  Thus, he credits the French Romantic novelist Chateaubriand with creating the intellectual ground for French conquests in Algeria decades later and he goes back even earlier – to the Italian Renaissance writer Dante in the 14th century! – for the basis of what he erroneously sees as an unremitting and unchanging European cultural hostility toward Islam.  (And this even though Dante had placed great Muslim philosophers like Averroes in an honored position alongside Plato and Aristotle!)

The other side of Foucault’s notion of power quoted above — the notion that “we must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms” – is crucial to another philosophy of today that is also rooted in Foucault, the autonomist Marxism of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.  Where Said’s work has had more of an academic influence, that of Negri and Hardt can be found throughout the activist communities that identify with anarchism or autonomist Marxism.  In New York last March at the Left Forum, one striking thing about the literature tables as opposed to a decade ago was the relative absence of vanguardist parties and the proliferation of autonomist and anarchist tables, with many of the latter carrying writings by Negri.

To his credit, Negri has helped to move a whole generation involved in the anti-globalization movement back toward Marx and away from some of the excesses of anarchism and postmodernism.  In Empire, published a decade ago, Hardt and Negri rightly point out that many forms of identity politics – including those of Edward Said — have been absorbed into global capitalism as part of its ideology.  They also express a healthy hostility toward statist communism and the vanguard party, while supporting various grassroots movements.  In addition, they point again and again to the relevance of Marx’s work, particularly the Grundrisse, to the analysis of contemporary capitalist reality.

But at the same time, Hardt and Negri’s concept of modern society and of the resistance to it is deeply Foucauldian and therefore mired in the politics of difference. They write at one point:  “Consider the most powerful and radical struggles of the final years of the twentieth century: The Tiananmen Square events in 1989, the Intifada against Israeli state authority, the May 1992 revolt in Los Angeles, the uprising in Chiapas that began in 1994, and the series of strikes that paralyzed France in 1995 and those that crippled South Korea in 1996” (Empire, p. 54).  To Hardt and Negri, these struggles were not commensurate and “could in no respect be linked together as a globally expanding chain of revolt” (p. 54).

As Marxist-Humanists, we would tend to see more commonalities among these six struggles than that.  Certainly Korea and France were new types of labor struggles in developed capitalist lands, while the Intifada, Chiapas, and Los Angeles each had anti-colonial or anti-racist dimensions, while China represented a post-revolutionary democratic and labor struggle against an entrenched state-capitalist system calling itself communist.  And to the extent that we did not see these movements speaking to each other, we would point to that lack as a problem that could be overcome, in no small part with the aid of a Marxist-Humanist philosophy of liberation that would help us both to appreciate the creative newness of each of these movements and to develop dialectical critiques of the their shortcomings.  Without such a dialectical unity among various forces of revolution in both developed and less developed capitalist societies, a really global struggle against capital and against the modern state could not emerge, and only such a global struggle rooted in a philosophy of liberation had a real chance to overcome the capitalist order.

Had Negri and Hardt stopped at the incommensurability of these six struggles, they would be nothing more than another example of the politics of difference.  But they go on to generalize about them in their own way, albeit very abstractly.  Each of these struggles, they write, carries with it the possibility of a global challenge to the power system.  This is because they subscribe, in Foucauldian fashion, to the notion quoted above to the effect that power is everywhere and nowhere, and that therefore it need not be resisted only at its pinnacle.  Instead, we can throw down the gauntlet of resistance at any point because power expresses itself both from above and below.  (They root all of this in Foucault’s concept of biopower from the History of Sexuality, which I do not have space to go into here.)

It is not a very big leap from there to write, as Hardt and Negri do, that a global multitude of the powerless is now in place as a web of resistance to capital, and that, in fact, it has already achieved numerous victories. This multitude – and not state policies from on high – is credited with destroying the old national and welfare state capitalisms that characterized the post-World War II liberal consensus.  The multitude is also credited with the possibility of bringing about a global emancipation from capitalism, without organization, without a unified philosophy, without even any real communication between its various sectors.

This gaping flaw in Empire is rooted in the type of philosophical outlook they have embraced, one that radically rejects all forms of what they term transcendence in favor of staying on the plane of immanence, i.e., taking elements within the given social reality as one’s point of departure. We are a long way from Simone de Beauvoir’s plea at the end of The Second Sex for women to cease to limit themselves to the world of immanence and to go forth into that of transcendence as well, an equally one-sided perspective that called upon men’s intervention rather than women’s own self-activity to initiate women’s liberation.

But we do not have to choose between such one-sided alternatives.  Consider Hegel’s standpoint, as summed up by the Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School: “To insist on the choice between immanence and transcendence is to revert to the traditional logic criticized in Hegel’s polemic against Kant” (Adorno, Prisms, p. 31). In fact, Hardt and Negri regularly attack Hegel and the Enlightenment philosophers as conservative and authoritarian, while extolling pre-Enlightenment republican traditions rooted in Machiavelli and Spinoza.  What they thereby cut themselves off from is the dialectical notion that a liberated future can emerge from within the present, if the various forces and tendencies that oppose the system can link up in turn with an theory of liberation that sketches out philosophically that emancipatory future for which they yearn.

Marx certainly overcame the pre-Hegelian split between immanence and transcendence.  The working class did not exist before capitalism and was a product of the new capitalist order, and was therefore immanent or internal to capitalism.  At the same time, however, the alienated and exploited working class fought against capital, not only for a bigger piece of the pie, but also engaged in a struggle to overcome capitalism itself, and was in this sense a force for transcendence (the future in the present).

At this point, my brief philosophical investigation of current challenges to dialectical and revolutionary thought has come full circle.  As with Habermas and the civil society/democracy tendencies, and here despite all their political differences with Hardt and Negri, one philosophical theme is common to both, a rejection of all forms of radical transcendence.  Above all, there is a deep hostility toward any notion of conceptualizing dialectically an alternative to capitalism.  In the case of the Habermasians, doing so is simply a dangerous utopianism that seduces us away from a needed pragmatic approach toward change.  In the case of Hardt and Negri, conceptualizing in a dialectical fashion feeds ultimately into authoritarianism and colonial hubris. Machiavelli, with his harshly “realist” pre-Enlightenment, pre-Hegelian view of human capacities – and his explicit rejection of “imagined republics,” i.e. the ancient Greek philosophical tradition — is said to offer a better perspective for today.  To Hardt and Negri, while we need to take up Marx’s critique of capital and his class analysis in modified form, above all we need to keep clear of Marx’s humanism, and especially that humanism’s expansive, Promethean side that points toward transcendence of the given.

To conclude, let me say that each of the schools of thought considered here offer serious challenges to revolutionary dialectics in the Marxist-Humanist sense.  None of them are absurd on their face and each of them appeals to deeply held experiences and intellectual ferments over past decades.  Habermas and the civil society people are responding to the failure of twentieth century revolutions to create new human societies, and have bounced back toward reformist liberalism. Said and postcolonial theory have adopted a politics of difference in response to the deep racism that persists in Western societies even after the Civil Rights movements and the anti-colonial revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s.  And Hardt and Negri are – albeit too abstractly and schematically – attempting to get Marxism into a dialogue with poststructuralism and other contemporary forms of radical philosophy in order to overcome the politics of difference that has paralyzed the left for the past three decades.

What can we do as Marxist-Humanists?  First, I think we have to stare negativity in the face, as old Hegel liked to say.  We have to realize what we are up against.  We have to realize that we are moving against some powerful currents – even on the Left – when we put forth our form of revolutionary dialectics.  Second, we have to realize that each of these three trends has reached an impasse, which will open up some of their followers to our point of view.  Habermasians have become very pessimistic about the growth of authoritarianism and racism in Western liberal democracies and see no way out. Postcolonialists may have reached the limit in terms of ascribing the problems of Asia and the Middle East to colonialism and its legacies.  And the Hardt/Negri solution of the multitude marching onward was never more than an interesting attempt, one that raised more questions than it answered.

That impasse creates an opening for us, for a form of Marxism that has developed a rich, variegated dialectic that takes into account different forms of struggle – not only around labor, but also around race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and youth.  Ours is also form of dialectic that takes account of counter-revolution within the revolution, a dialectical perspective born in the writings of Raya Dunayevskaya against Stalinist state-capitalism.  Finally, our Marxist-Humanist dialectic points to what we are for, to a philosophically grounded alternative to capitalism that we invite all serious revolutionaries to join with us in creating.  I can think of no more urgent task for our life and times.

This article originally appeared in US Marxist-Humanists on August 18, 2010