It suspect that the age of Jacobin social revolutions -- beginning with the French Revolution and ending with Iran's Islamic Revolution -- is over.
Gramsci posed a question: ". . . does there exist an absolute identity between war of position and passive revolution? Or at least does there exist, or can there be conceived, an entire historical period in which the two concepts must be considered identical -- until the point at which the war of position once again becomes a war of maneuver?" (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 108).
That historical period is now. Today, what is on the political agenda is indeed a war of position, and it is in this context I consider the concepts of hegemony and passive revolution as useful ones for working toward social change, especially in such countries as Iran and Venezuela.
What is passive revolution? Gramsci put it this way: "what was involved was not a social group which 'led' other groups, but a State which, even though it had limitations as a power, 'led' the group which should have been 'leading' and was able to put at the latter's disposal an army and a politico-diplomatic strength" (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 105).
In Venezuela, a petit-bourgeois populist leader has political supremacy; in Iran, one is at war of position with other petit-bourgeois leaders who are neoliberal. Workers, peasants, and others ought to push them for more change in their interest.
On a day when I am uncharacteristically optimistic, I think it not impossible to use "political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie," or at least go into that direction, despite great odds against it.
<http://montages.blogspot.com/2007/10/use-political-supremacy-to-wrest-by.html> Use Political Supremacy to Wrest, by Degree, All Capital from the Bourgeoisie
Official Marxism of the formerly socialist states depoliticized people, for the USSR and the PRC had much less room for political debates and social conflicts in the public sphere than Iran. Hence the eventual demise of socialism there.
That is the problem that Socialism of the 21st Century in Venezuela seeks to avoid, though that means slower and lesser transformation so far of political economy than in Iran, let alone the USSR and the PRC. Mark Weisbrot and Luis Sandoval write in "The Venezuelan Economy in the Chávez Years": "As can be seen in Table 1, the private sector has grown faster than the public sector over the last 8 years, and therefore the private sector is a bigger share of the economy in 2007 than it was before President Chávez took office" (emphasis added, July 2007, p. 6).
Chart: Venezuela, Real GDP
That stands in contrast to the experience of the Iranian Revolution, about which one neoliberal critic wrote disapprovingly: "Semi-official estimates put the private-sector share of the national economy at between 15 to 20 percent. This made the Islamic state a mixed capitalist-socialist economy predominantly under clerical control" (Akbar Karbassian, "Islamic Revolution and the Management of the Iranian Economy," Social Research, Summer 2000).
The question is, can people use "political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie," as Michael A. Lebowitz proposes below?
But, the idea of this socialism cannot displace real
capitalism. Nor can dwarfish islands of cooperation
change the world by competing successfully against
capitalist corporations. You need the power to foster
the new productive relations while truncating the
reproduction of capitalist productive relations. You
need to take the power of the state away from capital,
and you need to use that power when capital responds
to encroachments -- when capital goes on strike, you
must be prepared to move in rather than give in.
Winning the "battle of democracy" and using "political
supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the
bourgeoisie" remains as critical now as when Marx
and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
However, the success of this process is not at all
inevitable.There are, as there have always been within
the Bolivarian Revolution, powerful tendencies that
point in the opposite direction. Not only the strong
inclination of government ministers and managers
in important state sectors to plan and direct
everything from above (a pattern which has
successfully crippled independent workers' movements)
and not only the continuing culture of corruption and
clientalism which can be the basis for the emergence
of a new oligarchy. There is also a very clear tendency
which supports the growth of a domestic capitalist class
as one leg upon which the Bolivarian Revolution must
walk for the foreseeable future.
No Chavists these days, of course, openly argue that
socialism for the twenty-first century should depend
upon capital. Rather, all insist that the process at this
point requires the Bolivarian Revolution to tame private
capital through "socialist conditionality" -- i.e., by
establishing new ground rules as conditions under which
private capital can serve the revolution. In its best
versions, this may be seen as a process of transition,
that process of making "despotic inroads" and wresting,
"by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie." Certainly,
measures such as opening the books, imposing workers'
councils with power, demanding accountability to
communal councils, and transforming the workday by
introducing education for worker management introduce
an alien logic into capitalism -- the logic of new socialist
productive relations within capitalist firms.
However, the lack of clarity as to the nature of those
ground rules means that mixed signals are being sent out.
The "realistic" message that Venezuela is likely to have a
"mixed economy" for a long time, that there is a place for
private capital in the Bolivarian Revolution, and that a
sufficient condition for access to state business and state
credit is a commitment by capital to the interests of
communities and workers has brought with it the formation
of organizations such as Conseven, the "Confederation of
Socialist Industrialists," and other private capitalist
organizations busily defining private capital as socialist
property. "Productive socialism," it is being said in meetings
of "Chavist" capitalists around the country, requires private
capitalists as part of the socialist model.
In this case, rather than the "elementary triangle" of
socialism (units of social property, organized by
workers through social production, for the satisfaction
of communal needs), what is strengthened is the
capitalist triangle: private ownership of the means of
production, exploitation of wage laborers, for the
purpose of profits. However lofty the language of social
responsibility, the pursuit of profits dominates:
commitment to the community becomes, effectively,
a tax, and worker participation becomes shares in
the company to induce workers to commit themselves
to producing profits. As may be seen from the
disappointing experience of the EPS (which has followed
this pattern), capital accepts these constraints as
conditions in order to ensure its right to exploit and
generate profits until it is strong enough itself to impose
capitalist conditionality.
The Bolivarian Revolution, like all revolutionary processes,
produces its own potential gravediggers. To the extent
that it fosters the infection of the logic of capital, the
Bolivarian Revolution does not walk on two legs but,
rather, has one leg walking backward. When we
acknowledge that this tendency is flourishing within the
process and add it to the continuing pattern of clientalism
and corruption, the remaining enclaves of old capitalist
power (in banking, import-processing, land-ownership,
and the media), and the constant presence and threat of
U.S. imperialism, it is obvious that there are formidable
barriers to the struggle for socialism in Venezuela.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In a relatively short time, the Bolivarian Revolution has
come a long way. It still faces many problems, and its
success will only occur as the result of struggle -- not only
a struggle against U.S. imperialism, the champion of
barbarism around the world, which is threatened by
any suggestion that there is an alternative to its rule; and,
not only against the domestic oligarchy with its capitalist
enclaves in the mass media, banks, processing sectors,
and the latifundia. The really difficult struggle, I've argued,
is within the Bolivarian Revolution itself -- in the divergence
between a would-be new Bolivarian oligarchy and the
masses of excluded and exploited.
These are struggles that all Latin America faces. As I
concluded in Build it Now, "every place these struggles
proceed, though, will make it easier for those who have
gone before and those yet to come." Venezuela's lesson
needs to be understood and communicated widely: its
focus upon human development and revolutionary
practice, its missions in education and health, and its
creation of communal councils as the basis for a
revolutionary democratic state cannot help but inspire
masses elsewhere and create the condition for a
revolutionary leadership to emerge. The real lesson of
the Bolivarian Revolution, though, is what can happen
when there is a dialectic of masses which understand
that there is an alternative and a revolutionary leadership
prepared to move in rather than give in. (Michael A.
Lebowitz, "Venezuela: A Good Example of the Bad Left
of Latin America," Monthly Review 59.3, July-August 2007)
I cannot guarantee that the Bolivarian strategy will work for Venezuela (difficulties that this strategy faces are highlighted in the above excerpt from the Lebowitz article -- read the full text to see its promising aspects), or it can be applied in Iran to reverse the trend toward gradual adoption of the neoliberal model after Khomeini's death, but the idea certainly merits serious consideration by all, religious or secular, who struggle against the neoliberal stage of capitalism and imperialism.
On 10/10/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 9, 2007, at 10:59 PM, bitch at pulpculture.org wrote:
>
> > To be fair, I agree that Doug ought to just ignore Yoshie's chum --
> > because that's what often goes on is baiting and taunting.
> > But let's see it work on both side, hmmm?
>
> Yoshie never lets anyone else have the last word. There must *always*
> be a response.
One day, it will be quite unremarkable for a woman to have the last word, both in the Islamic and Marxist traditions. Give left-wing men's responses to me, I rather think that the chances of a feminist theocracy led by a woman are higher than those of a feminist dictatorship of the proletariat led by a woman. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, for instance, Muslim men have already seen women heads of state. -- Yoshie