3
Michael Cox
Introduction
The modern history of historical materialism begins – some would say ends – with the collapse of actually existing socialism as a serious political project after 1989. Some might dispute this reading of events, and no doubt a few would insist that the value of Marxism as a method has little or nothing to do with what existed in the former Soviet bloc. As one reasonably sympathetic critic has argued, it is neither logical nor fair (in fact, it is most ‘unfair’) to assume that the collapse of authoritarian communism necessarily invalidates the insights of Marx or the utility of historical materialism (Thomas 1997). One might equally point to the indisputable fact that the history of Marxism is a history of crisis, and that the current crisis so-called is merely another blip in the evolution of a body of ideas that have constantly been revised from within and challenged from without. Thus why be too bothered about the current situation? (but compare Gamble 1999). Indeed, according to Alex Callinicos, the real ‘crisis of marxism’ did not begin in 1989 at all but 1977 when a certain French intellectual decided to launch a bitter attack on Marx and all his works (Callinicos 1982: 5–6). One could go on rebutting the charge, but in the end it would be faintly absurd, distinctly unhistorical and in a very important way ‘unmarxist’ as well, not to recognize the simple truth that while crises are nothing new to Marxism, there has never been anything quite so cataclysmic in the history of Marxism as the fall of the old communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR; and whether we prefer to talk of a crisis of historical materialism or a crisis of a particular and peculiar type of social formation, it would be a nonsense-on-stilts to deny some sort of connection between what happened in the Soviet bloc after 1989 and the current travails facing radical theory in general and Marxist analysis in particular. The collapse of the left as an organized force in the world, and the rapid decline of academic interest in Marxism (one prominent international relations (IR) theorist recently suggested that constructivism had now replaced Marxism as the most obvious paradigmatic rival to realism and liberalism; Walt 1998: 32, 34), would seem proof enough of the argument that radical materialist analysis in general and Marxism in particular is facing difficult times (but see Wood and Foster 1997; and the chapter by Teschke and Heine in this volume).
The point of this short piece is not to mount a defence of Marxism against its many detractors, but rather to suggest that in spite of its current travails, taken together the collapse of the Cold War system, and along with it the old international rules of the game, could ironically provide radical theory with an intellectual shot in the arm. Nor am I the only one to suggest this somewhat iconoclastic idea. As has been observed by others, while historical materialism is in many ways an excellent surgical tool, it was never very good when it came to discussing nuclear weapons, arms control and the sources of Soviet conduct. In many ways, the Cold War conflict didn’t really suit it and its passing (and substitution by a more materialist set of global relations) has created new intellectual opportunities which did not exist before. But this is not all. Precisely because radicals no longer feel obliged to defend the USSR, a political space has opened up that permits them to think more openly and creatively. As Stanley Hoffmann has noted, whatever one thought of socialism as a practical goal, historical materialism itself always possessed a rare ability to expose and explain. Unfortunately, too many Marxists became drawn into the Cold War and consequently were impelled to choose sides rather than develop an independent line of analysis. Now however the situation is far more fluid and less politically determined, and in these ‘new times’ there is now greater scope to realize the still unrealized potential in historical materialism (Hoffmann 1995: 35). Finally, as the doyen of liberal American historians has recently pointed out, the irresistible dynamic of our modern form of ‘unbridled capitalism’ makes very fertile ground indeed for radical analysis. In fact, as Arthur Schlesinger has already warned, there is a very real danger that in a world of ‘low wages, long hours’, ‘exploited workers’ and ‘social resentment’, Marxism could easily take on a new lease of life. Though John F. Kennedy’s most favoured historian could hardly be expected to welcome this development (and doesn’t) his observation about the consequences of capitalism is an acute one, which both critics and defenders of modern capitalism would be well advised to heed (Schlesinger 1997). Some it would seem have already done so (Gray 1998).
Whether or not Schlesinger’s nightmare scenario is ever realized will of course depend in large part on the credibility and vitality of historical materialist analysis itself. Nothing after all is inevitable, and if Marxists fail as badly in their attempts to explain the shape of the post-Soviet world as they did in analysing the contradictions of the former Soviet Union itself, then Marxism has (and deserves) no future. It might therefore be useful to see how the varieties of Marxism, neo-Marxism and radical theorizing have thus far come to terms with a world they, and nearly everybody else for that matter, never anticipated. In what follows I shall therefore try to summarize a large, very uneven and deeply schismatic literature. In my brief review I will include many writers who some might not even include within the fold; and others who themselves would not be comfortable being labelled as Marxist. Robert Cox for example is often associated with Marxism, though he himself could hardly be described as orthodox (Cox 1981, 1983). The same might be said of Andre Gunder Frank whose most recent work seems to challenge the whole edifice of Marxist thought on the history of capitalism (see Frank and Gills 1993). Noam Chomsky moreover is no Marxist. On the other hand, his writings on the new international order are highly critical of the status quo (Chomsky 1994). Furthermore, unlike many of the analysts mentioned in this chapter, his works have a fairly wide readership, especially outside the narrow confines of the international relations profession.
I have divided the discussion into four sections. In the first, I look at the way radicals have tried to come to terms with the death of actually existing socialism and the associated international result in the shape of the ‘end of the Cold War’. In the second, I examine their efforts to decode the meaning of the term ‘globalization’. The third part then sees whether or not radical analysts have developed a theory of crisis. Finally, the fourth part examines the way or ways radicals have tried to come to terms with American power. In the concluding section I explore what is by far and away the greatest problem facing radical analysis today (possibly its greatest problem throughout the twentieth century): identifying the source of political regeneration in a world where there is possibly as much, if not more, suffering than at any point over the last fifty years, but little sense that much can be done to alleviate it.
The end of the Cold War
The collapse of Soviet power and with it the end of the Cold War was as big a surprise to most radicals as it was to more mainstream analysts, perhaps more so because many on the Western left had a certain regard for ‘actually existing socialism’: quite a few out of a misplaced sense of political loyalty, some because they just didn’t like capitalism, and others because they felt that the Soviet Union (whatever its faults internally) played an internationally progressive role by counterbalancing the power of the United States while underwriting numerous anti-imperialist regimes – especially in the less developed countries of what was then, but is no more, referred to as the ‘Third World’ (Halliday 1993).
Lacking a proper political economy of communism (for reasons which would take too long to discuss here) radical analysts have in the main tried to deal with the politically problematic question of the fall of official socialism not by confronting the problem head on, but rather by finessing the issue. They have done so in a number of different ways.
The first way, quite simply, has been to deny that the regimes in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union were genuinely socialist. Thus what ‘fell’ between 1989 and 1991 was not the real article, but some odd hybrid which had little or nothing to do with what American Marxist Bertell Ollmann once tried to describe as ‘Marx’s vision’ of the new society. This inclination to deny the socialist authenticity of the former USSR can in fact be found in the writings of many radicals, though it is perhaps most strongly articulated in the work of Hillel Ticktin, editor of the journal Critique, and the only Western Marxist to have developed a detailed political economy of the USSR before its disintegration. According to Ticktin (who was one of the few radicals to have ever lived in the USSR for any extended period of time) the Soviet system was not just repressive, but economically far less efficient than what existed in the West. For this reason he did not believe that what he termed this ‘economy of waste’ could endure over the long term. This view – first articulated as early as 1973 – in turn became the basis of a very specific politics which meant that Ticktin at least was somewhat less surprised than other Marxists by the Soviet Union’s subsequent collapse. Indeed, in his opinion, until the USSR passed from the stage of history, there was little chance of a genuine ‘new’ left ever emerging in the West (Ticktin 1992).
If Ticktin detected deep and life-threatening economic flaws in the Soviet system, this was not the position of most socialists. Indeed, one of the more obvious ways in which other radicals have tried to come to terms with the fall of the Soviet Union, has been to imply that the system did not have to go under at all: and the only reason it did was because of ill-fated attempts to reform the country in the 1980s. Thus one of the better informed socialist economists has argued that although the Soviet Union had its fair share of problems, it did not face a terminal crisis. What brought it down, in the end, was not its flaws but Gorbachev’s contradictory policies (Ellman and Kontorovich 1992). The American radical Anders Stephanson (1998) also insists that there was nothing inevitable about the demise of communism in the USSR. In his assessment it was largely the result of what he terms ‘contingency’. Halliday too has suggested that the Soviet system did not (in his words) ‘collapse’, ‘fail’ or ‘break down’ (1994: 191–215). Rather, the Soviet leadership after 1985 decided – albeit for good objective reasons – to rule in a different way: and did so not because of massive internal difficulties, but because the Soviet elite finally realized that the USSR could neither catch up with nor compete with the West. Once this became manifest, the ruling group effectively lost its historical nerve (Halliday 1995).
The argument that the old Soviet system might not have been suffering incurable economic cancer has also led certain radical writers to the not illogical conclusion that if the system was not doomed because of its internal problems, it was in the end external factors which caused it to implode. This is certainly implicit in the influential work of Halliday who, significantly, says little about the USSR’s domestic weaknesses, but a good deal about the impact which Western economic performance had upon Soviet elite perceptions. Others have stressed a more direct connection. Thus in the view of the Dutch Marxist, Kees van der Pijl, though the final transformation of the Soviet system was the result of several factors, one should not underestimate the role played by the United States and its declared objective of quite literally spending ‘the Soviet Union into bankruptcy’ (van der Pijl 1993). Robert Cox appears to have come to much the same conclusion in his writings. Like van der Pijl, Cox accepts there is no simple explanation of what happened in the former USSR after 1985. Nonetheless he still concludes that ‘the arms race provoked by the Reaganite phase of the Cold War was too much for an unreformed Soviet economy to sustain’ (Cox with Sinclair 1996: 217). Michael Ellman has also laid great stress on the importance of US strategy: taken together, Reagan’s rearmament programme, Star Wars, and US support for anticommunist guerrillas throughout the world, were, in his opinion, ‘key external factors’ in bringing about Soviet economic collapse in 1991 (1993: 56).
But if the left has faced very real problems in coming to terms with the fall of the Soviet Union, it has tried to compensate for this in two very different ways.
One has been to understate the impact which communist collapse has actually had upon the ‘essential’ nature of the international system. Hence, in the view of Noam Chomsky (1992), there is nothing ‘new’ at all about the new world order: the rich remain rich, the poor South remains the poor South, and the United States still remains in charge. Robert Cox concurs. The new international system, he thinks, looks very much like the old one. Indeed, in the most basic of ways, the Cold War he argues has ‘not ended’ at all and its more basic structures continue ‘to live in the West’ in the shape of high military spending, in the operation of its intelligence services and in the unequal distribution of power among the various states (Cox with Sinclair 1996: 34). This also appears to be the position of the doyen of world-systems theory, Immanuel Wallerstein. Unfortunately, in his metastructural (and highly abstract) output over many years, one had no real sense that the Cold War ever had much meaning at all. Thus its conclusion was unlikely to have a great deal of impact upon a world-system that had existed since the sixteenth century, which had been in some fairly unspecified ‘crisis’ since the late 1960s, and would presumably remain in crisis until it came to an equally unspecified end twenty or thirty years down the historical line (Wallerstein 1979, 1996).
Finally, if writers like Wallerstein have tended to minimize the impact of the end of the Cold War, others have argued (perhaps rather more convincingly) that its passing has in fact created new political spaces that did not exist before. This is more or less the position adopted by Bogdan Denitch. Starting from the not unreasonable assumption that the division of Europe rested upon an illegitimate form of Soviet domination over the East, and a legitimate form of American hegemony in the West, Denitch concludes that in the new united continent there are now great opportunities. Unlike many politically active Marxists, Denitch is no utopian. Thus in his view the new openings are unlikely to free the workers from the grip of capitalism. Yet 1989 does make possible the deeper integration of Western Europe and upon this basis, Europe – in his opinion – will be able to develop a new social democratic third way between a highly dynamic but politically unacceptable American-style liberal capitalism and a moribund Soviet-style communism. This hardly amounts to the same thing as world revolution. Nonetheless, in a post-communist world, the possibility of building a new progressive Europe is one that should animate intelligent radicals more than pointless calls to man barricades which nobody wants to build and few want to stand behind (Denitch 1990: 3–14).
New world economic order: globalization
Though analysts like Denitch have tried to find some crumbs of comfort from the events of 1989, overall the collapse of planning in Eastern Europe, followed as it was by the adoption of radical market strategies in countries such as Poland and the Czech republic, had (as we have already suggested) an enormously debilitating impact upon Western Marxists. Yet the pessimism did not last long, and the few Marxists who managed to survive the baptism by fire began to take intellectual heart somewhere around the mid-1990s. There were two reasons for this. One, obviously, was that the transition in the former communist countries turned out to be far more problematic than most market triumphalists had originally anticipated. In the case of Russia of course the so-called transition to something better and higher soon turned into a minor tragedy for the Russian people (see Cox 1998). The other, equally important, reason was the birth of a new world order in which economics assumed centre stage. In fact, it almost looks now as if it required a healthy dose of capitalism to re-ignite radical analysis and provide the intellectual left with a clear focus. But perhaps we should not be so surprised by this. In an age of geo-economics where even staid bankers were now prepared to use words like ‘capitalism’, where the former editor of the London Times talked menacingly of the ‘coming depression’ (Davidson and Rees-Mogg 1993), and an American President paid tribute to a book which speculated in almost Leninist terms about the coming economic struggle for dominance between the great powers in the twenty-first century (Thurow 1992), it was almost inevitable that some Marxists would take heart! Having been ground under politically since 1989, it looked to some of them at least (and at last) that historical materialism had finally come of age.
Rather than trying to provide a detailed reconstruction here of a single ‘neo-Marxist’ analysis of late twentieth-century capitalism (one which has yet to be written), it might be more useful to briefly point to some of the issues now being debated in the growing left-wing literature. Not surprisingly, one issue that has been discussed more than most is ‘globalization’. While there is no agreed radical view on the subject, four quite reasonable questions have been asked of the concept since it literally exploded on to the academic agenda in the early 1990s.1
The first has perhaps been the most challenging: namely, what exactly is so new about the idea? As many on the left have argued, the apparently novel thesis that national economies have become mere regions of the global economy and that the productive forces have expanded far beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, is not novel at all.2 Indeed, one of the first writers to advance the argument was no less than the abused and much ignored Karl Marx, who in the Communist Manifesto made it abundantly clear that the central feature of the capitalist epoch was the ‘universal interdependence of nations’. Moreover, this simple but critical idea ran like a red thread through Marxist thinking thereafter. It was, for instance, repeated by Lenin in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism in an effort to provide a materialist explanation of the First World War. Trotsky also deployed very much the same argument in his critique of Stalin’s claim that it was possible to build socialism in one country. And later theorists of dependency took it as read that until the less-developed countries could break away from the spidery economic web of the world market, they had no chance of overcoming the limits of backwardness (Baran 1957; Frank 1969). Globalization might have become a fashionable concept in the 1990s among those desperately looking for a ‘relevant’ topic now that traditional security questions no longer seemed to be interesting. But like most intellectual fads and fashions it was only a recycled version of a very old idea. In fact, according to Burnham (1997), even the idea itself was not a very good one.
The theme of continuity is also developed in the work of Hirst and Thompson (1996). However, rather than attacking mainstream academics for failing to recognize the radical antecedents of the concept, they question whether or not globalization is even an accurate description of the world economy in the late twentieth century. In a much-cited study whose underlying purpose is as much political as it is economic, they conclude that the image of globalization has for too long mesmerized analysts.3 In their opinion the theory can be criticized on at least two grounds. The first is in terms of its descriptive power. In their view the ‘present highly internationalized economy is not unprecedented’ at all; indeed, ‘in some respects the current international economy is less open and integrated than the regime which prevailed between 1870 and 1914’. Moreover, ‘genuinely transnational companies appear to be relatively rare’ (p.2), while the world economy itself, far from being genuinely ‘global’, is still very much dominated by the Triad of Europe, Japan and North America. They also question its political implications and suggest that far from being powerless as the theory implies, the state can still make a difference. As they argue, in this less than completely globalized economy, there are still opportunities for the development of governance mechanisms at the level of the international economy that neither undermine national governments, nor hinder the creation of national strategies for international control. In other words the world of ‘markets’ remains susceptible to conscious intervention. To this extent, the world economy is not out of control: politics, politicians and the people – in other words the state under conditions of democracy – can make a difference.4
A third line of radical attack has not been to question the reality of globalization so much as to point to its appalling human consequences. In a world where the market is ‘unbound’ – they argue – where there is in effect no alternative to the market, capitalism has assumed an increasingly aggressive posture: and this has led to the most extreme forms of inequality and economic polarization (Altvater and Mahnkopf 1997; also Hurrell and Woods 1995; and Saurin 1996). Nor is this accidental: nor can it be overcome without challenging the foundations of the system itself. Furthermore, if global economic integration has generated what one critic has rather mildly termed ‘underconsumptionist tendencies’, it has tended to do so not only within capitalist countries but also across them (Palan 1993). This is why the gap between the have and have-not nations has tended to increase rather than decrease in an era of global capitalism. According to one study, in an unregulated capitalist world economy, the outcome has been that those countries and regions which already possessed abundant resources and power have remained powerful and prosperous, while those that did not have become poorer and even more dependent than before (Sayer and Walker 1992).
Finally, many radical critics have wondered whether or not some of the advocates of globalization have tended to underestimate the anarchic and competitive character of the world capitalist system. Though accepting the more general thesis about global interdependence, many on the left do not accept the liberal corollary that we have moved beyond the age of conflict. And though war in the more traditional sense is highly unlikely, this does not rule out intense competition at the other levels. Realist by inclination, radicals have noted several areas in the world today where antagonism rather than co-operation is the norm. America’s intense rivalry with France over trade, Germany’s attempt to exercise economic hegemony over Europe at the expense of the United Kingdom, and the United States’ more recent drive to open up the markets of Asia-Pacific, all point to a slightly less benign view of economic reality than that suggested by the ‘globalists’ (Petras and Morley 1997).
Capitalist contradictions
Perhaps the most serious difference however between radicals and their more orthodox peers concerns the long-term stability of world capitalism. Though few but the most orthodox economists would subscribe to a simple theory of global economic equilibrium, there is an underlying assumption among most non-Marxists that even though the international economic system might go through periodic booms and busts, these movements are either functional to the system overall (Schumpeter recall once talked of ‘creative destruction’) or can easily be resolved.5 Naturally enough radicals do not share this sense of optimism. Nor in one sense can they given their opposition to the status quo. The problem for the left of course is that they have too often cried wolf before to be taken seriously now. However, with the onset of the Asian economic crisis it at last seems as if their prediction of economic doom has finally turned out to be true; and inevitably they have drawn some comfort from the fact that the Asia-Pacific miracle so-called has turned into a nightmare – one that has even prompted The Economist to ask whether the world as a whole is on the cusp of a new slump.6
But long before the collapse of capitalist optimism in Asia, radicals had already begun to articulate a theory of crisis. Basically, this consisted of a number of distinct arguments.
The first part was in essence an updated version of Hobson mediated via Keynes and restated in different forms by radical economists like Sweezy and Magdoff: and what this amounted to in effect was a belief that there was a fundamental contradiction between the world economy’s capacity to produce, and the people’s ability to consume. In other words, there existed what Marx had frequently referred to in his work as a systemic tendency to overproduction – one which he thought could not be overcome as long as capitalism continued to exist. Though long consigned to the proverbial dustbin of history, this particular theory has enjoyed something of a revival over the past few years, and not just among radicals but also more mainstream economists concerned that the great boom of the 1990s could easily be followed by the great crash of the early twenty-first century. Indeed, the thesis itself has been given an enormous boost with the publication of the evocatively sub-titled study by Wiliam Greider, The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism. Though Greider’s underlying argument is not designed to support revolutionary conclusions, the fact that his study evokes the ghost of Marx (and has become an instant best-seller) would suggest that what one radical reviewer has called this ‘powerful and disturbing book’ has touched a very raw nerve among more orthodox analysts (Greider 1997).
Greider’s pessimism however is not just based upon a general argument about the overproductive character of modern capitalism. It also flows from a more detailed analysis and awareness of the increasingly integrated and highly open character of the international economy, which allows billions to be moved, or lost, in a matter of hours; and where events in one country or set of countries are very rapidly felt around the world in a domino process that once set in train becomes very difficult to stop. A good example of this was provided by what happened in Hong Kong in late 1997. Here a 25 per cent fall on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange quickly led to a major decline in share prices around the world. In the same way, the meltdown in Indonesia has had a profoundly depressing effect upon the rest of Asia, while the financial crisis in Japan has sent seismic shocks right across the Pacific to the United States. And so it will go on according to radicals until governments either decide to reflate the world economy – which they are scared to do politically – or there is the crash predicted by Greider.
The argument that the system might well be spinning out of control is further supported in radical analysis by the argument that we are now living in an era where finance rather than industry – and finance capital rather than productive capital – have assumed the dominant role in the world economy.7 While there may not be anything especially ‘radical’ about this particular empirical observation, there is about some of the conclusions which radical theorists tend to draw from it. First, in their view, the preponderance of finance effectively means that capitalism today has little or no interest in supporting industrial policies that sustain full employment. This therefore means that the system overall is now less able to fulfil at least one basic human right: the right to work. More generally, the overwhelming power of finance capital introduces enormous instability into the system as those with money either seek speculative gain with little concern about the political consequences of their actions, or move their money at very high speed if and when conditions change. What makes the situation all the more volatile of course is that there are no national or international means for controlling these various movements and flows. Consequently, a very dangerous and apparently unbridgeable gap has opened up between those institutions that are supposed to manage the world economic system in the general interest and the specific interests of the banks, the large pension funds and the insurance companies.
Finally, the tendency towards crisis in the post-Cold War epoch has been reinforced, it has been argued, by the end of the Cold War itself. Though not all radicals adhere to the argument that the Cold War was good for capitalism (there was a powerful current of thought which suggested the opposite) there are those who maintain that even though the superpower conflict was costly these costs were more than offset by the benefits. By the same token, while there has been obvious economic benefits accruing from the termination of the Cold War, its ending has created major problems for the West as a whole. First, governments in key capitalist countries like the USA and the UK no longer have military spending as a way of pump priming their economies (Markusen and Yudken 1992). Second, there are the unforeseen but really quite huge costs involved for Germany caused by reunification – costs that have transformed Germany from being a boom economy into one of the great under-performing economies of Europe. Third, though the end of the Cold War has been followed by what most radicals see as a temporary boom in the USA, its passing has fundamentally weakened America’s capacity to act abroad. And without American leadership, the international order in general and the world capitalist system in particular are bound to suffer. Working on the good realist assumption that American power was an essential element in the post-war reconstruction of international capitalism, a number of radicals believe that now that the Cold War is over and America can no longer exercise its hegemony so effectively, the world system is likely to become a good deal less stable (McCormick 1995). Difficult times lie ahead for the last remaining ‘superpower without a mission’ (Cox 1995).
Hegemonic still? The United States
This brings us quite logically to the question of the United States: the source of most radical distaste during the Cold War, and the cause of much intellectual anguish since, it has now seen off the only power in the world capable of limiting its reach. Though less vilified in the 1990s than it was previously, the USA nonetheless continues to fascinate radicals in ways which no other nation does. The reasons for this are clear. No other country is as powerful, dynamic or as ‘exceptional’ as the United States of America. Indeed, according to one ‘European’ analyst, even American radicals and Marxists are more interesting and ‘have been more intellectually productive and innovative’ than their comrades across the Atlantic since the late 1960s! (Therborn 1996).
Three issues have been of greatest interest to radical critics: one concerns the use of American power; another, the nature of American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era; and the third America’s position within the larger international system. Let us deal briefly with each.
The question about American power has been an especially problematic one for the left in the post-Cold War period. Naturally enough, most (but by no means all) radicals opposed American intervention against Iraq in 1991. However, since then, many have found themselves in the somewhat paradoxical position of attacking the United States not for being too interventionist, but for not being interventionist enough. The issue which led to this rather odd state of affairs was of course the war in ex-Yugoslavia. Here the left found itself caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, being radicals they were deeply suspicious of any American involvement on the continent of Europe. On the other hand, it was palpably clear that if the USA did not get involved, the genocide in Bosnia would continue. There was no easy squaring of this particular circle. Some, therefore, decided to stick to their ideological guns and opposed any American role (Petras and Vieux 1996). Others, however, bit the political bullet and urged Washington on. Indeed, one of the greatest ironies of this particular tragedy was that many radicals who had earlier criticized the United States for having intervened in the Gulf because of oil, now pilloried the USA for not intervening in the Balkans because there was no oil. Moreover, having been the strongest critics of the American military before Bosnia, some on the left at least now became the most bellicose advocates of tough military action against the Serbs.
If radicals seemed to have had serious problems in dealing with USA power in the post-Cold War world, they appear to have had none at all in attacking America’s self-proclaimed goal of promoting democracy. To be fair, they did not oppose the United States because they were against democracy as such, but rather because they thought that its championing of the policy was either a sham or, more obviously, a device designed to obscure America’s economic objectives in the larger capitalist system. Chomsky in fact has even argued that the USA has actually deterred democracy,8 while Furedi in his broadside has attacked all Western talk of making the world a better place as little more than a cover for neo-colonialism (Furedi 1994). Others have been slightly less harsh, or at least more subtle. This is certainly true of the important work undertaken by Gills and Robinson in their analysis of the Third World. In an attempt to move the argument forward, both have proposed the thesis that certain forms of ‘low intensity democracy’ have had an important role to play in both containing popular protest while legitimizing painful economic reforms being advocated by Washington (Gills et al. 1993; Robinson 1996). Robinson indeed has put forward a whole historical argument concerning the complex interplay between social change and elite rule in Latin America. Deploying the much used and admired Gramsci, he argues that by the 1980s it had become clear to the dominant group that the old repressive methods were no longer workable in an age of globalization; and supported by the USA, they therefore replaced coercive means of social control with consensual ones. Though the policy carried certain risks, in the end it achieved precisely what it had been designed to do: namely, to secure political stability in a period of social upheaval caused by Latin America’s more complete integration into the world capitalist system.
The third and final ‘great debate’ has turned around the hoary old problem as to whether or not the United States is, ever has been, or will be, in decline. Regarded by many in the IR profession today as a non-issue (though this was not the view between the Vietnam War and the end of the Cold War) it continues to inform a large part of the modern radical discussion about the USA. Some like Bernstein and Adler (1995) are in little doubt that the United States is in decline – and has been so since the late 1960s. Others like Stephen Gill assert that the ‘declinist’ thesis is quite false (1986, 1990). Clearly there is no consensus on the issue, and it would be misleading to suggest that there was one. Yet whereas radicals before the collapse of the USSR were more inclined to believe that the United States was on the way down, since 1991 they have tended (along with nearly everybody else) to assume that there is still a good head of steam left in the engine of the American capitalist machine. US success in the Cold War, its easy victory over Iraq, the financial crisis in Japan, Europe’s inability to resolve the situation in ex-Yugoslavia and the economic boom in the USA after 1992, have in fact convinced many that American power is still something to be reckoned with. Indeed, according to one study written by a Latin American with impeccable left-wing credentials, Marxists have to face up to the unpalatable fact that the United States is not only not in decline, but can actually look forward to the future with enormous self-confidence. The prophets of (relative) doom like Paul Kennedy may know their history according to Valladao; however, they are in his view a century or two adrift; and if historical analogies must be drawn then it should be with Rome in triumph after its victory over Carthage, not with Britain in the post-war period, or Spain in the sixteenth century. The twenty-first century will be American (Valladao 1996).
Changing the world
The issue of American power leads finally to the question of political renewal on the left. The two are obviously connected. After all, if America is in decline as some on the left believe, the political possibilities for radicals would seem to be bright. If, on the other hand, we can look forward to continued American hegemony, then capitalism by implication must be secure: and if capital is secure, then the possibility of radical breakthrough is highly unlikely.
This in turn raises the even larger problem of what radicals or Marxists are supposed to do in a world where on the one hand the ‘socialist alternative’ seems to have failed, and where on the other the market, in spite of its manifest contradictions, looks like ‘it’s the only game in town’. The intellectual left has responded to this dilemma in a number of ways. Two deserve special mention here.
The first has been to accept that for the time being there may in fact be no alternative to the market, and the only thing one can do, therefore, is develop strategies that seek to build areas of opposition and resistance within the larger interstices of ‘civil society’ – either at the national or global level (Held 1997). With this in mind, no doubt, many on the left have endorsed campaigns to extend the realm of democracy or increase the degree of information available to the public at large. In Britain a good deal of radical energy has also been expended on supporting constitutional change, while in the United States radical activists have been involved in an as yet unsuccessful effort to develop a comprehensive health system. The left have also engaged in numerous other campaigns covering a range of questions, from women’s rights and trade union recognition, right through to the increasingly popular issue of the environment – on which there is now a vast academic literature. Indeed, one of the more interesting developments over the past few years has been the marked rise in a radical discourse on major environmental questions. One might even be tempted to suggest that the struggle to save ‘mother earth’ from what some now see as impending environmental catastrophe has taken over from the equally influential movement ten years previously to prevent the collapse of the world into nuclear war.
The second way in which the left has responded to the current situation has been to explore ways and means by which the dynamics of globalization can either be slowed down or even arrested entirely – a perspective explored with typical intellectual sensitivity by Robert Cox. According to Cox, there is no reason for despair insofar as the dynamics of globalization are bound to throw up various forms of resistance around the world. This will come from many layers impacted by the internationalization of production, including groups outside of the production process proper. Resistance to global capitalism however is also bound to involve workers themselves who have been placed under unremitting pressure by the logic of a global capitalism constantly seeking to weaken the position of organized labour (Cox with Sinclair 1996: 191–208). According to radical critics, moreover, the proletarian genie is not just a figment of some rabid left-wing imagination. In country after country – from South Korea to France, from Germany to the United States itself – workers have begun to take action to resist attempts to make them mere robots in a world without frontiers, where capital owes no loyalty – except of course to its shareholders.9 They may not yet have united, but at last the workers are beginning to act.
However, as Cox would be the first to admit, resistance to globalization is not exactly the same thing as a positive or coherent strategy, and until there is such a strategy, there will always remain what he calls ‘a vacuum to be filled – a challenge to critical thinking on the left’. And at the heart of this challenge ‘is the question of the motive force for change’ (Cox with Sinclair 1996: 192). For if the working class is not the universal class described by Marx, and the vision of a new society has been besmirched by the experience of the USSR, then there is little possibility of major political transformation. Furthermore, even if the world is in crisis, or in what Hobsbawm prefers to call a ‘state of social breakdown’, without a vision of a different society, nothing can fundamentally change (1994: 459). This presents radicals with a major problem. For however sound their analysis, if the world remains the same (or even gets worse) they will simply be left standing where they have been for a very long time: on the sidelines of history. In this sense their greatest challenge perhaps is not so much intellectual as political; and until they can provide a coherent answer to the question of what it is they are for rather than what it is they are against, they will remain what they have been, in effect, for more years than they would care to admit – well-informed rebels without a political cause.
Notes
1. According to Anthony Giddens, ‘globalization is almost worth not naming now: it is less a phenomenon, it is simply the way we live. You can forget the word globalization: it is what we are’ (cited in John Lloyd, ‘Interview: Anthony Giddens’, New Statesman, 10 January 1997).
2. For a materialist though not necessarily orthodox Marxist account of the long history of capitalist economic interdependence see Braudel (1973, 1982, 1984) and Germain (1996).
3. In her radical critique of the view that states are now powerless to make policy because of globalization, Linda Weiss (1997) even talks about ‘the enhanced importance of state power in the new international environment’. The Canadian Marxist, Leo Panitch (1994), is another radical who disputes the notion that globalization has rendered national politics meaningless.
4. According to the blurb on the back of one noted study on the new ‘borderless world’, ‘nation states are dinosaurs waiting to die … [they] have lost their ability to control exchange rates and protect their currencies … they no longer generate real economic activity … the fate of nation states are increasingly determined by choices made elsewhere’ (Ohmae 1996).
5. In an attack on what he identified as a ‘Marxist vision’ of a world economic crash, the American economist, Lester Thurow (1997), argued that elected governments could and would in the end act to prevent the destruction of ‘both the economic system and democracy itself’.
6. See ‘Will the World Slump?’, The Economist, 15 November 1997, pp. 17–18.
7. One well-established Marxist has argued that the era of ‘financial expansion represents the “autumn” of a prevailing capitalist order as it slowly gives way to a new order’ (Arrighi 1994; see also Altvater 1997).
8. Chomsky’s discussion of democracy and America’s role in supporting it in the post-war period is somewhat more nuanced than the actual title of his book – Deterring Democracy – would suggest. See, in particular, ‘The Decline of the Democratic Ideal’, ibid., pp.331–50.
9. See ‘Global Economy, Local Mayhem’, The Economist, 18 January 1997, pp. 15–16.
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