Book Review: "What We Are Fighting For: A Radical Collective Manifesto" – ed by Federico Campagna and Emanuele Campiglio
What We Are Fighting For consists of 20 short articles
written by various thinkers and activists connected with the anti-austerity and
Occupy movements that have emerged in recent years.
Where it is at its best, it is essentially Marxism in
disguise. Michael Albert’s ‘balanced job complexes’ is a concise reformulation
of what Marx described as ‘ending the division between mental and manual labour’,
whilst Richard Seymour’s discussion of the ‘new model commune’ essentially
outlines the functions of the early Soviets.
Occasionally, the Marxism is overt. Peter Hallward’s defence
of the notion of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is a useful reminder
that radical forces will be viciously crushed if they ever start to make an
impact – and as the author of a detailed study of the repression of the Haitian
popular movement in recent years, it is a lesson with which he is all too
familiar.
Where it is less good is where it neglects class analysis
altogether. Some writers fall victim to the all-too-prevalent trap on the left
of treating neoliberalism as a policy choice, rather than simply the natural
expression of crisis-era capitalism. The danger here is that this can lead to a
deradicalised nostalgia for the days of Keynesianism: not only uninspiring as a
vision of a future society, but impossible to deliver for a capitalism
operating in a different economic climate – not to mention the immorality of
demanding a return to a social democracy that was predicated on colonial and
neocolonial exploitation. Pettifor even presents 1930s USA and Britain as
models, as they “threw off the chains of private banking” by, in the case of
the British Tory administration, leaving the Gold Standard. But a ruling class
forced by workers’ revolt – mutiny in this case - to adopt measures to save its
own skin should hardly operate as the yardstick of progressiveness. One wonders what those who were on the
receiving end of means tests and benefits cuts would make of this depiction of
the 1930s as an era of progressive government.
Owen Jones is also here, employing his masterly trademark combination
of stating the bleeding obvious whilst totally missing the point. A new working
class movement must, he tells us, demand well-paid jobs. Thanks Owen!
The problem with presenting the capitalism that existed thirty
years ago as some kind of ‘radical alternative’ is that it thoroughly
emasculates the term. Certainly critiques of neoliberalism are useful – but
only if neoliberalism is properly understood as the mechanism of bourgeois
exploitation in the era of capitalist crisis, and not simply an unfortunate and
misguided policy choice.
As Alberto Toscano points out in his contribution, it is
today precisely reformism – with its dreams of reinstating a system that was
the product of entirely different social conditions – that is now utopian, akin
to demanding that the sun come out at midnight.
Where the book succeeds, then, is less in its analysis and
more in its commitment to the process of beginning to map out alternatives to
capitalism. The Mondragon cooperative movement in the Basque country and
practical examples of democratically controlled finance from Vietnam make
Milford Bateman’s chapter interesting reading. Shaun Chamberlain highlights the
importance of creating counter-narratives to challenge the hegemony of ruling
class mythology and posits that our “fundamental challenge” lies in
“challenging and changing the stories that define success, identity and meaning
in our culture”. David Graeber develops this theme by arguing for the need to
redefine certain key terms that have been colonized by the enemy, such as work,
democracy and communism, to rescue their meanings from the parodies they have
been reduced to by the ruling class.
A further theme that emerges is that of democratization of
the economy: emphasizing the fact that capitalism is a fundamentally
authoritarian institution, in complete contrast to its own pious claims; and
self-government, therefore, is its antithesis. Albert’s contribution, sketching
out what a genuinely participatory economy might look like, succeeds in opening
the debate as to how a socialist society might actually work.
There are other interesting suggestions here: Dan Hind, for
example, discusses the practicalities of organizing a democratic, publicly
commissioned mass media. Whilst not possible until after a revolution, in my
view, envisioning post-revolutionary possibilities is nevertheless a worthwhile
activity; and, far from being an exercise in pie-in-the-sky utopianism can
actually become a motivational subjective force for revolution in itself. The
danger is that without a revolutionary outlook behind such ideas, there is
always the possibility that these ideas can be embraced, neutered and sold back
to us by a capitalism hungry for new ideas; as Campagna puts it, “capitalism
[always] manages… to follow our requests to the letter and to return them to us
realized, if slightly modified. That slight modification, as we all know, is
the tiny poison pill that turns all our ‘realized’ demands into even tighter
chains.”
The book’s tagline is a misnomer: it’s clearly not a
manifesto. But it is a step towards the kind of debate necessary if one is to
be written.
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