Written by Carl
Boggs and first published at Political
Animal Magazine
At this
particular juncture of history, fraught with new dangers and new challenges, it
is time for humanity (or crucial sectors of it) to being exploring the
intersection between politics and ecology, between the requirements for radical
change and unprecedented challenges posed by the global crisis. For many
reasons, this dialectic has rarely been addressed, even among progressives and
leftists. One dimension of this failure – central to the key arguments
that follow – is the declining relevance of the Marxist tradition, in all of
its variants, to provide intellectual substance for any future anti-system
politics.
The extreme
gravity of what humanity now faces – not only global warming but a world of
shrinking natural resources and drastic food shortages – means that time for
creating a viable strategy is running out. The problem worsens once the
momentous tasks at hand are taken into account: a revitalized politics,
sustainable economic development, popular shifts in both cultural behavior and
natural relations. Sadly, in the world to date we encounter no
movements, parties, or governments that even remotely meet this challenge.
For at least a
century after the deaths of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – that is, the end
of the nineteenth century – Marxism in one expression or another was viewed as
foundational to any prospects for a transition from capitalism to
socialism. Central to that transition was always faith in a
proletarian-based revolution, the logical outcome of industrializing (but
crisis-ridden) capitalism. Historical development was expected to
generate deepening systemic contradictions ultimately leading to economic
breakdown and social upheaval, though the distinctly political elements
of this process usually remained vague, ill-defined; strategy was always a
point of intense difference across the entire trajectory of Marxism.
For reasons
nowadays abundantly clear, however, the potential linkage of theory and action
within the tradition – the source of political agency – has essentially
vanished. Marxism no longer shapes or informs any viable opposition to
capitalism, in any locale. Indeed it has been a full century since the
last widespread working-class insurgency against capitalist power, the
1919-20 Biennio Rosso in Italy, which ended in crushing
failure.
Prospects for
overcoming the modern crisis will depend on the capacity of counter-forces to
build and carry forward an ecologically-sustainable world system, and that
means effective social control over the instruments of economic and political
power. Without a concrete strategy for winning such
power, however, there can be no hopes for revolutionary change. This
great conundrum revolves around the question of power pure and
simple. And today the dynamics of power are shaped, more and more, by the
incessant (seemingly irreversible) process of capitalist rationalization first
thoroughly charted by Max Weber roughly a century ago.
Among its vast
consequences, rationalization serves to recast the entire realm of politics, or
governance, in ways widely familiar into the present. Those consequences
are nothing short of epic: convergence of economic and governmental power, an
increasingly state-centered system of rule, strong oligarchical tendencies,
expanded technological rationality, corporate globalization. One result
of this process has been ongoing solidification of corporate-state capitalism
that prevails in the United States and a few other industrialized countries – a
rather different pattern from that anticipated by Marx or even Weber.
Never in history have ruling elites been able to exercise such overwhelming
power over economic development, state governance, social life, and the global
ecology.
Nether Weber,
leading Marxists of the early twentieth century, or later theorists of
capitalist power such as C. Wright Mills could have foreseen the degree to
which later fortresses of domination would impede prospects for revolutionary
change. The broadening matrix of power explored in the following chapters
has been (especially in the U.S.) concentrated along three fronts: technology
and the surveillance order, militarism and the warfare state, intensification
of globalized power. None of these dynamic historical forces was ever
seriously analyzed in tandem by Marx or Weber, nor indeed by most other
twentieth-century theorists.
The recent
dramatic growth of technological corporations, mostly centered in North
America, Europe, and Asia, can hardly be exaggerated. What is best
described as a Big Tech oligarchy – Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon,
Twitter, Apple, etc. – now amounts to the largest, most powerful assemblage of
capitalist giants in history, its influence over communications, the economy,
government, and culture without parallel.
Ostensibly
forums of free speech, social interaction, and diversity of views, these
bastions of technological modernity have become just the opposite: centers of
ideological monoculture where much-celebrated diversity and inclusion rarely
extends to the domain of thought or ideology, where censorship is more and more
common. While social media has virtually overnight become
indispensable to public life in the U.S. and elsewhere, communication flows are
increasingly governed by algorithms generally congruent with elite interests.
By the 1950s
Mills had identified yet another component of postwar American
state-capitalism, a prelude to President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about
the “military-industrial complex”. That “complex” has grown steadily
throughout the decades, now comprising several enlarged sectors: the Pentagon,
CIA, NSA, law enforcement, Homeland Security.
For the world’s
leading superpower since World War II, this apparatus has been rooted in
several interrelated phenomena – pursuit of global supremacy, endless wars,
military Keynesianism, empire of bases, a massive nuclear complex. In the
U.S., at least, we have seen how this institutionalized order has become a
state within the state, largely outside the routine flow electoral politics.
As a clear roadblock to oppositional politics, this could not have
been imagined by Marx or Weber, or even Mills.
Aligned with
Big Tech, the intelligence apparatus, and warfare state, a vast global network
of corporate and financial interests has taken on a life of its own.
Transnational capitalism has seamlessly given rise to such international
organizations as the World Bank, IMF, World Trade Organization, G20, and NATO,
all presiding over a system of concentrated wealth and power, including 17
financial enterprises in control of more than $40 trillion of wealth. As
of 2020 this staggering accumulation of power appeared fully out of reach of
the local populations, national communities, labor unions, and social
movements.
At this moment
in history anyone concerned about the future of planetary life faces a pressing
question: could such a globalized behemoth possibly be transformed into a
sustainable world order?
Viewed against
the larger historical backdrop, Marxism winds up diminished as a political
force – a predicament unlikely to vanish. A proletarian
revolution today, however defined, seems more out of reach today than it did a
century ago. Among three strategic alternatives within Marxist politics –
social democracy, Leninism, council communism – only Leninism ever gave rise to
what might be viewed as successful revolutions, starting with Russia at the end
of World War I.
The ultimate
fate of Leninism in that country, however, was Stalinism which eventually led
to ideological decline before the final collapse in 1991. Other Communist
regimes (China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea) currently exist as harsh
authoritarian departures from anything Marx (or indeed Lenin!) had in
mind. Neither social democracy (an appendage of liberal capitalism) nor
the council tradition has generated anything close to a proletarian revolution
or transition to socialism.
Could something
akin to Leninist strategy make sense today as a political mechanism bringing
about the transition to a new order consistent with ecosocialist values – or is
that strategy more likely to reproduce authoritarian outcomes? What
is often forgotten about Lenin’s classic theory of revolution, in my opinion
rather distinct from its later Stalinist deformation, is its actual rejection
of classical Marxism, starting with its assertion of the “primacy of politics”
over the earlier “primacy of economics”. Seeing that workers and other
subordinate groups would never achieve revolutionary consciousness through
everyday material struggles, Lenin’s well-known impatience led him to embrace
the vanguard party as agency of both mass mobilization and conquest of state
power.
To succeed, the
Bolsheviks would need crucial political advantages: centralized organization, a
coherent ideology, creative leadership from a stratum of intellectuals,
readiness to win state power and attack the main centers of established
resistance. This very approach had been dismissed by Marx and Engels, who
believed any form of “Jacobinism” or “Bonapartism” – a premature seizure of
power – was ultimately doomed.
In the end, a
modified Jacobinism (defined further in the text of this book) might offer a
distinctly political solution, one way out of the crisis, but that would pose a
huge threat to liberals, social democrats, and others fearful of genuine change.
Communist parties in the West that once might have been regarded as agencies of
anti-system change long ago succumbed to the pressures of deradicalization, and
there is probably no reversing that outcome. A similar dynamic has
overtaken other erstwhile oppositional forces, most recently social democrats
and Greens.
One alternative
would be to build a Gramsci-style Jacobinism from the ground, bypassing the
failed counter-forces inherited from the past. Another prospect might be
a tectonic radicalization of larger Green parties in Europe, which have (in
varying degrees) already subscribed to a project of ecological
rationality. Whatever the path ahead, we know (or should know) that time
is running short. A future global food calamity alone, rendered likely by
shrinking land and water resources, ought to be warning enough.
Given
twenty-first century realities, on the other hand, it might seem that any
Jacobinism is destined to be negated by the spread of postmodern culture, where
oppositional tendencies are increasingly fragmented and dispersed, broken into
multiple interests, outlooks, and identities. Insofar as Jacobinism
signifies a global aspiration, a grand narrative of the first
order, it would be forced to move directly against the main historical
currents. There are plenty of reverberations to this actuality, all the
more so for many industrialized societies where contemporary identity politics
around race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality dominate the landscape.
Indeed
distinctly “global” issues such as imperialism, war, and ecology – not to
mention class politics rooted in the Marxist tradition – now appear marginal,
secondary at best. In the U.S., perhaps more than elsewhere, identity
politics has for many years prevailed over agendas that might be congruent with
Jacobinism or indeed any project of radical change.
The fatal
deficit of identity politics, however, is a built-in failure to envision
societal-wide change; its very logic is partial, fragmented,
conservative. It is built around warring groups doing essentially
horizontal battle while ruling elites continue business-as-usual. As
such, identity politics can only impede oppositional movements. Its
“strategy” (or lack thereof) is accompanied by a debilitating ethos of anti-politics.
The modern
crisis, on the other hand, demands full-scale political commitment along lines
of “climate Jacobinism”, a mechanism serving two distinct purposes: to achieve
a planetary or ecological set of objectives, while also creating a
counter-force that could overturn the global power apparatus. If such a
Jacobin force winds up the price of reversing a descent into uncharted horrors,
could the bargain be worth the investment?
Carl Boggs is the author of many books in the fields of critical social theory, American politics, U.S. foreign policy and military history, film studies, and ecology. After receiving his Ph.D. at U.C., Berkeley he taught at Washington University in St. Louis, Carleton University in Ottawa, UCLA, USC, and U.C., Irvine. He is currently professor of social sciences at National University in Los Angeles. He is a regular contributor to the magazine CounterPunch, is a member of the executive board of the Global Studies Association, and is involved with such journals as Theory and Society, Fast Capitalism, and New Political Science. He is recipient of the Charles McCoy Career Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association, as well as several other awards in teaching and writing. His new book Facing Catastrophe: Food, Politics, and the Ecological Crisis, is available from Political Animal Press.
