Last Sunday I put an article written in 2004 titled “The Limits of Social Movements: An untimely reflection” by Marc Saint-Upéry on the Marxmail website. It was translated by Ethan Young, a Marxmail subscriber, who quite rightly viewed it as an important contribution to an ongoing debate, even though history has more or less superseded it.
In the late 1990s the “anti-globalization” movement spawned efforts to theorize revolution on non-Marxist terms, even though lip-service was occasionally paid to Marx. In works such as Hardt-Negri’s “Empire” and John Holloway’s “How to Change the World Without Taking Power” there was an attempt to write off traditional Marxists concepts of taking state power in order to construct a more just economy based on human need rather than private profit. Evoking ideas found in autonomism, ultraleft or council communism and anarchism, Hardt-Negri and Holloway became fixated on the act of struggle itself rather than the goal of seizing power. In its aversion to centralized political power through the dreaded “Leninist” party, this sector of the left squandered opportunities to make a revolution in Argentina. Setting up roadblocks became an end in itself, while the need to coordinate strategy on a national level was dismissed as outmoded Leninist thinking. Saint-Upéry writes: As soon as they take part in the dispute over the common good and the social order, social movements move openly and directly to politics and contribute to the definition of the political agenda. Nevertheless, the relation of the social movements with politics - much less politicians - is not usually understood in the sense of state institutions, public policy and electoral competitions. In the latest debates on social movements in Latin America, there was a certain tendency to presuppose the existence of an emphatic split between social self-organization and political institutions. This absolute dichotomy often reflects a slippery attempt at moralizing the strategic debate, and a new version of old fundamentalist impulses. Nowadays, the question is: just what is the revolution, who are the revolutionaries and the reformists, how best to distinguish the “pure” from the “impure” in order to defend the virginity of idealized social movements against any institutional contamination. The most extreme form of this purism is found in a curious book by John Holloway. However, I believe that Holloway’s thesis is only the hyperbolic crystallization of a vague but insistent ideological mood that other authors offer in more qualified forms. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/reflections-on-marc-saint-upery/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
