Alex Callinicos:
'I THINK THERE’S A SERIOUS WEAKNESS IN BORIS’S UNDERSTANDING OF IMPERIALISM'
'I THINK THERE’S A SERIOUS WEAKNESS IN BORIS’S UNDERSTANDING OF IMPERIALISM'
Thanks very much. And thanks to everyone involved in the campaign who've put in so much work to getting this conference off the ground. I'm involved in the campaign, but I've done far less than many others. I've known Boris Kagarlitsky since March 1990. We met in Moscow in the latter days of the Soviet era, when Mikhail Gorbachev was still president of the Soviet Union. So, we go back a long way. Over the years, I've met him again and again, in different parts of the world, very often, because we were both involved in what was so misleadingly called the anti-globalization movement, the movement against neoliberal globalization. So, we met at forums and demonstrations everywhere. I noticed that there were some old comrades from that era at this virtual meeting, I saw Leo Gabriel, for example, who I haven't seen for many years. Hi, there.
Like us all, I admire Boris tremendously for his lucidity, his courage, his determination, and also his wit. And I'm very happy to be here expressing once again, my solidarity with him. I also admire him intellectually, which doesn't mean necessarily agreeing with him. At the start of The Long Retreat, Boris actually refers to a disagreement (actually, not one that I strictly recognize) that I had with a much earlier book of his, The Dialectic of Change, around 1990, I think. But we have disagreed over the years as well as massively agreeing on most things. Our dialogue has been going on many years and, in the same spirit as, uh, as Bill pursued, in his very important and interesting contribution, I want to talk a bit about some disagreements with The Long Retreat. The disagreements spring from comradeship and solidarity and mutual respect.
I just want, however, first to say something about a particular quality of Boris's writings, which is his internationalism. Of course, he's someone who's deeply rooted in the Russian soil, in Russian realities. And this reflects, is reflected in his very courageous refusal to go into exile or take part in a prisoner exchange or whatever. But nevertheless, he views these realities from a global perspective. More specifically from the more Marxist version of world systems theory that is an important part of his intellectual armoury. And this internationalism is very visible in The Long Retreat, partly in the range of reference that he has. So, he doesn't just talk about Marx, he talks about Weber, and about Schumpeter. He draws on a range of intellectual sources, but his internationalism is also expressed in how he seeks to address the common situation of the left, not just the situation of the left in Russia.
That's very clear in the contributions we've already heard from Nancy and Bill. They see his work as offering something that is politically important for them in both their cases as socialists in the United States to address. Boris’s internationalism is analytical. In the book, he confronts the state of, the global left, in what I call in my most recent book, The New Age of Catastrophe – economic stagnation, the Covid 19 pandemic, climate catastrophe, and the terrible wars, raging in Ukraine and Gaza, the latter now spreading, with terrible consequences, to Lebanon. Now, I agree with much of Boris's diagnosis. But it's boring just to agree. And so I want to talk about the disagreements.
I've got two particular differences. The second one very much overlaps with a lot of the things that Bill said. So, I'll only come back to what I think are the problems with Boris's anti-woke ism if I have time. But the first disagreement is what I'd call a tension in his historical analysis. In part one of The Long Retreat, Boris has a very good analysis of the context in which the Russian Revolution of 1917 took place, more particularly the First World War. And as he's already done in an earlier book, The Empire of the Periphery, he conceptualizes Tsarist Russia, as a weak imperialist power, struggling to maintain its position and advance its interests in the context of the rivalries between the stronger imperialist powers Germany, Britain, France and later, of course, the United States. So, he presents a picture which in a certain way is fairly orthodoxly Leninist of a world that is being wrecked by inter-imperialist rivalries, by the struggle for global domination of the great imperialist powers.
Now, I think this analysis is fully applicable to the present world. We live in a world that is increasingly structured by the rivalry between China and, to a lesser extent, Russia and, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other. And therefore, I fully agree with Nancy. We have to say no to Putin, but also no NATO when it comes to the war in, in Ukraine. But Boris doesn't take this step in The Long Retreat. He instead focuses on the domestic Russian causes of the invasion, the contradictions of the Putin regime that lead it to take this savage act of attacking and seeking to conquer Ukraine. Of course, that's an important part of the story, and what he says is very useful.
But I couldn't understand why he stopped there and didn't talk about, the global context. And it's only in reading one of the texts that Boris has produced from prison that I understood the answer. It's amazing how fertile and productive he manages to be in very difficult conditions. If we talk about an anti-imperialist conflict, that means that imperialism is on both sides. Now, no one doubts that the United States is an imperialist power. Russia is still a weak imperialist power. It's been returned, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, to its past status, as Boris puts it, as an empire of the periphery, seeking to maneuver in an environment that it very much doesn't control, doesn't dominate. Weakness, of course, is consistent with and may indeed encourage brutality, as we've seen in how Russia has conducted the whole war in Ukraine.
But one key effect of the present war and reflecting Russia's weakness has been to push it closer to China. One of the things that the Western media scratch their heads about is that the Russian economy didn't collapse because of Western sanctions, that, on the contrary, the Russian economy is growing quite fast. It's experiencing a consumer boom. Now that's partly because, as the Western commentators like the Financial Times grudgingly admit, Putin has a very clever economic team, a group of economic technocrats who've essentially adopted a policy of military Keynesianism.
But there's a key external factor, which is the support that China has given Russia, partly in buying Russian oil and gas, but also in supplying Russia with the hi-tech goods that it needs in order to continue the war.
Like us all, I admire Boris tremendously for his lucidity, his courage, his determination, and also his wit. And I'm very happy to be here expressing once again, my solidarity with him. I also admire him intellectually, which doesn't mean necessarily agreeing with him. At the start of The Long Retreat, Boris actually refers to a disagreement (actually, not one that I strictly recognize) that I had with a much earlier book of his, The Dialectic of Change, around 1990, I think. But we have disagreed over the years as well as massively agreeing on most things. Our dialogue has been going on many years and, in the same spirit as, uh, as Bill pursued, in his very important and interesting contribution, I want to talk a bit about some disagreements with The Long Retreat. The disagreements spring from comradeship and solidarity and mutual respect.
I just want, however, first to say something about a particular quality of Boris's writings, which is his internationalism. Of course, he's someone who's deeply rooted in the Russian soil, in Russian realities. And this reflects, is reflected in his very courageous refusal to go into exile or take part in a prisoner exchange or whatever. But nevertheless, he views these realities from a global perspective. More specifically from the more Marxist version of world systems theory that is an important part of his intellectual armoury. And this internationalism is very visible in The Long Retreat, partly in the range of reference that he has. So, he doesn't just talk about Marx, he talks about Weber, and about Schumpeter. He draws on a range of intellectual sources, but his internationalism is also expressed in how he seeks to address the common situation of the left, not just the situation of the left in Russia.
That's very clear in the contributions we've already heard from Nancy and Bill. They see his work as offering something that is politically important for them in both their cases as socialists in the United States to address. Boris’s internationalism is analytical. In the book, he confronts the state of, the global left, in what I call in my most recent book, The New Age of Catastrophe – economic stagnation, the Covid 19 pandemic, climate catastrophe, and the terrible wars, raging in Ukraine and Gaza, the latter now spreading, with terrible consequences, to Lebanon. Now, I agree with much of Boris's diagnosis. But it's boring just to agree. And so I want to talk about the disagreements.
I've got two particular differences. The second one very much overlaps with a lot of the things that Bill said. So, I'll only come back to what I think are the problems with Boris's anti-woke ism if I have time. But the first disagreement is what I'd call a tension in his historical analysis. In part one of The Long Retreat, Boris has a very good analysis of the context in which the Russian Revolution of 1917 took place, more particularly the First World War. And as he's already done in an earlier book, The Empire of the Periphery, he conceptualizes Tsarist Russia, as a weak imperialist power, struggling to maintain its position and advance its interests in the context of the rivalries between the stronger imperialist powers Germany, Britain, France and later, of course, the United States. So, he presents a picture which in a certain way is fairly orthodoxly Leninist of a world that is being wrecked by inter-imperialist rivalries, by the struggle for global domination of the great imperialist powers.
Now, I think this analysis is fully applicable to the present world. We live in a world that is increasingly structured by the rivalry between China and, to a lesser extent, Russia and, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other. And therefore, I fully agree with Nancy. We have to say no to Putin, but also no NATO when it comes to the war in, in Ukraine. But Boris doesn't take this step in The Long Retreat. He instead focuses on the domestic Russian causes of the invasion, the contradictions of the Putin regime that lead it to take this savage act of attacking and seeking to conquer Ukraine. Of course, that's an important part of the story, and what he says is very useful.
But I couldn't understand why he stopped there and didn't talk about, the global context. And it's only in reading one of the texts that Boris has produced from prison that I understood the answer. It's amazing how fertile and productive he manages to be in very difficult conditions. If we talk about an anti-imperialist conflict, that means that imperialism is on both sides. Now, no one doubts that the United States is an imperialist power. Russia is still a weak imperialist power. It's been returned, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, to its past status, as Boris puts it, as an empire of the periphery, seeking to maneuver in an environment that it very much doesn't control, doesn't dominate. Weakness, of course, is consistent with and may indeed encourage brutality, as we've seen in how Russia has conducted the whole war in Ukraine.
But one key effect of the present war and reflecting Russia's weakness has been to push it closer to China. One of the things that the Western media scratch their heads about is that the Russian economy didn't collapse because of Western sanctions, that, on the contrary, the Russian economy is growing quite fast. It's experiencing a consumer boom. Now that's partly because, as the Western commentators like the Financial Times grudgingly admit, Putin has a very clever economic team, a group of economic technocrats who've essentially adopted a policy of military Keynesianism.
But there's a key external factor, which is the support that China has given Russia, partly in buying Russian oil and gas, but also in supplying Russia with the hi-tech goods that it needs in order to continue the war.
BUT BORIS DENIES IN THIS RECENT TEXT THAT I'M REFERRING THAT TO THAT CHINA IS ITSELF AN IMPERIALIST POWER. HE ARGUES THAT THE CHINESE ELITE IS FAIRLY INDIFFERENT TO THE WORLD OUTSIDE IT. IT'S NOT TRYING TO SHAPE THE WORLD. IT'S SIMPLY OPPORTUNISTICALLY TAKING RESOURCES AND MARKETS FROM THE REST OF THE WORLD. NOW, THIS SEEMS TO ME COMPLETELY WRONG.
China is the biggest manufacturing and trading economy in history, and the biggest goods exporter. An economy like that, as Britain and Germany were in the past, and also in its own more complicated way, the United States was, cannot be indifferent to its external environment. It has to shape it. And we see that China seeks to shape it itself partly through a mixture of diplomacy and ideological self-projection by presenting itself as the guarantor of a genuinely pluralistic globalization, as opposed to the kind of globalization that the US has promoted.
But beyond this diplomacy and cultural policy, China is in conflict with the United States. This is true, crucially, in geoeconomic terms. I don't have time to elaborate much, but China and the United States are competing over whose economy is going to dominate the green transition. Look at the panic in the US and the EU over Chinese firms’ increasing success in producing cheap and high-quality electric vehicles. But there's also a geopolitical conflict. The Chinese elite have made it perfectly clear that they want to end the United States's dominance of the Asia Pacific region, the dominance that it has enjoyed since the end of the Second World War. Taiwan is part of this story, but it's just part of a larger story. And because Asia is the dynamo of the world economy, this is a life-or-death issue for the United States. Now, when you begin to unravel the nature of the competition between the US and China, this is an inter-imperialist conflict. And it's this conflict that provides the context to the Ukraine war that makes Russia's continued participation sustainable, and that gives the US the incentive to keep the war going. This is the context to the plight of Boris and the other Russian anti-war prisoners that we’re in solidarity with. So, I think there’s a serious weakness in Boris’s understanding of imperialism.
Now, since I've got a little time, I want to say that I share Bill's reservations about Boris anti-wokeism. For example, I agree completely with what Bill says about Boris's mistakenly generous interpretation of the so-called Freedom Convoy or whatever it called itself in in Canada a couple of years ago. I think that Boris historically tends to be relatively understanding of movements that, even if they have a reactionary political content, are motivated by what he sees as legitimate economic grievances. Bill's right that in this case, he's wrong about the grievances having a legitimacy. But I think that this is a broader tendency that helps to explain the mistaken view that Boris took of the separatist movements in the southeast of Ukraine around 2013-14.
And I think Bill is absolutely right that race and one could say also migration, which are central issues to the advance of the far right that is taking place on such a frightening scale in Europe, isn't treated sufficiently seriously and sufficiently materialistically by Boris. I would say also, very briefly, that if we look at so-called anti-woke ideology, one key element is the polemic that the far right, with the support of the Catholic Church and so on, make against what they call “gender ideology”.
And this attack on trans rights and trans liberation is central to the kind of hegemonic project that the far right is trying to pursue. It plays on all sorts of male anxieties and maybe resonates with the kind of revanchism that Bill was talking about, but it also fits in with the “Great Replacement” theory, the idea that there's an elite plot essentially to shrink the white population of the world and subordinate them to peoples of other cultures. So, these so-called identity issues are actually very important issues, both in the construction of the far right, but also for the left. If the left wants to speak to people in the 21st century, for example, to the young people who, certainly in Britain, are so inspired by the movement for trans liberation, the left needs to learn to find ways of understanding and presenting the fights over race and gender and so on as part of its own political project.
This means that I very much agree with Nancy, when she talks about linking together what we might call narrowly class issues and issues of identity. We have to fight on the bread-and-butter economic issues like wages and austerity and so on. But we also have – and this for me is of fundamental importance – to reflect the reality that the kind of working class that exists, well, throughout the world, but certainly in the old imperialist core these days in North America and in Europe is increasingly diverse and multicultural, layered and divided in all sorts of ways because of economics and racism and so on and so forth. But it's this diverse, heteroclite working class that is the potential agent of liberation. We need to construct a politics that is capable of encouraging more and more workers to see themselves as working class and as part of this collective project.
Now, I don't think Boris would disagree for a moment about the necessity of doing this. But if you want to achieve a certain objective, you need to be clear about the means and the particular points of conflict that it involves. And this means developing a politics that is sensitive to the issues of oppression and the struggles for liberation that they give rise to. I'll leave it there. It's clear that there are disagreements with Boris among the participants to this conference, but I think it's a tribute to the power of his thought that he should have stimulated us to think about these issues. Thanks very much.
Now, since I've got a little time, I want to say that I share Bill's reservations about Boris anti-wokeism. For example, I agree completely with what Bill says about Boris's mistakenly generous interpretation of the so-called Freedom Convoy or whatever it called itself in in Canada a couple of years ago. I think that Boris historically tends to be relatively understanding of movements that, even if they have a reactionary political content, are motivated by what he sees as legitimate economic grievances. Bill's right that in this case, he's wrong about the grievances having a legitimacy. But I think that this is a broader tendency that helps to explain the mistaken view that Boris took of the separatist movements in the southeast of Ukraine around 2013-14.
And I think Bill is absolutely right that race and one could say also migration, which are central issues to the advance of the far right that is taking place on such a frightening scale in Europe, isn't treated sufficiently seriously and sufficiently materialistically by Boris. I would say also, very briefly, that if we look at so-called anti-woke ideology, one key element is the polemic that the far right, with the support of the Catholic Church and so on, make against what they call “gender ideology”.
And this attack on trans rights and trans liberation is central to the kind of hegemonic project that the far right is trying to pursue. It plays on all sorts of male anxieties and maybe resonates with the kind of revanchism that Bill was talking about, but it also fits in with the “Great Replacement” theory, the idea that there's an elite plot essentially to shrink the white population of the world and subordinate them to peoples of other cultures. So, these so-called identity issues are actually very important issues, both in the construction of the far right, but also for the left. If the left wants to speak to people in the 21st century, for example, to the young people who, certainly in Britain, are so inspired by the movement for trans liberation, the left needs to learn to find ways of understanding and presenting the fights over race and gender and so on as part of its own political project.
This means that I very much agree with Nancy, when she talks about linking together what we might call narrowly class issues and issues of identity. We have to fight on the bread-and-butter economic issues like wages and austerity and so on. But we also have – and this for me is of fundamental importance – to reflect the reality that the kind of working class that exists, well, throughout the world, but certainly in the old imperialist core these days in North America and in Europe is increasingly diverse and multicultural, layered and divided in all sorts of ways because of economics and racism and so on and so forth. But it's this diverse, heteroclite working class that is the potential agent of liberation. We need to construct a politics that is capable of encouraging more and more workers to see themselves as working class and as part of this collective project.
Now, I don't think Boris would disagree for a moment about the necessity of doing this. But if you want to achieve a certain objective, you need to be clear about the means and the particular points of conflict that it involves. And this means developing a politics that is sensitive to the issues of oppression and the struggles for liberation that they give rise to. I'll leave it there. It's clear that there are disagreements with Boris among the participants to this conference, but I think it's a tribute to the power of his thought that he should have stimulated us to think about these issues. Thanks very much.
QUESTIONS
Nancy Fraser: Thank you. Well, thanks to the three speakers, those were all really insightful and interesting comments. And I wanted to say something about the relation of gender, race and class, the primacy of class, the inadequacy, though, of dismissing race and gender as wokeism and so on. I think it's very important to distinguish between the structural plane at which we think about these issues and what some people here are calling the identity plane. And I want to just say on the structural plane, in my opinion, gender and race are not alternatives to class. They are divisions and differentiations within it which are structurally generated by capitalism itself. I alluded to this much too quickly in my earlier remarks. You cannot extract surplus value from doubly free workers in factories without somebody doing the unpaid social reproductive work that that produces them. And without somebody supplying below cost, raw materials, energy and other inputs. Du Bois was mentioned earlier: you don't have Manchester without Mississippi. Today you don't have Cupertino without Shenzhen and without Kinshasa. So, these are all imbricated across the globe.
I was trying to say to stress the heteroclite and diverse character of the global working class, but we should say more as Marxists than that it's diverse. We should be able to say something about what structurally makes it diverse and what structurally creates the divisions and appearances that gender and race are somehow, you know, not connected to class. This is what I was trying to get at, and my thought was that, to overcome fragmentation – it's an experiment, you know – how far could we get by redescribing a lot of issues around gender and around race and empire as labour issues. How far could we get in trying to reveal to the social actors themselves that gender and race are not epiphenomenal but are formations that are generated within the class structure of capitalism. I think that's a different position. But then the idea is that these are three things that we have to think about, take account of all of them, and it's certainly different from the idea that only class is real and fundamental. Thank you.
Devparna Roy: Thank you. I am Devparna Roy, associate professor of sociology at Nazareth University in Rochester, New York state, United States. I am very happy to be able to get the opportunity to speak with you all today. Thanks, Nancy, Alex, Bill and Jayati. The first point relates to the question of gender and race as I teach American undergraduates about race and ethnicity. I teach them about intersectionality, a concept that has been created by black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberlé Crenshaw. So, is there a way to infuse intersectionality concept with a structuralist perspective, and how would that help us combat what Nancy Fraser has correctly identified as a central question that the global left faces today? A second follow up question relates to the matter of de-growth. I haven't had the privilege to read Boris's book as yet, but does Boris deal with the question of de-growth? And could Professor Jayati Ghosh would kindly address the issue?
Tanya Marquette: I really appreciate the comments of everybody. And I don't know that I will sound as coherent as some of those who spoke. I'm in New York State. I have been a community organizer on different issues, predominantly on race, gender and health, for pretty much all my adult life. My concern is with some comments that Bill Fletcher made where he was using Covid as an example. And one of the things that I find with the left that's a real concern of mine is how while people on the left may understand corporatism and capitalism, they seem to have a segmented way of looking at health care, as if the health industry is different from any of the other industries. And one of the things that I have seen very clearly is that the medical industry, which is an industry no different than any of the others, has completely commoditized the human body for profit. And it has been done intentionally. Anybody who does research into that, which I have done quite a bit of, knows it was intentional. It has focused on only supporting drugs that can be patented for profit, which means that it attacks anything natural. It will rape the environment for natural products that they can then turn into patented drugs. There's a long history of that, and Covid is the perfect example of how an entire population has been brought under control.
As I think a Belgian psychologist wrote, his name is Matthias Desmet, this is mass formation gaining complete control of the population in order to subordinate them to the needs of the corporate class. The studies on Covid, on the drugs that are used have been fictional. They've been fraudulent. They have been used intentionally to depopulate the world. The one million deaths in this country are mainly from the drugs that were used, called vaccines and treatments such as ventilators and remdesivir, a drug that in many tests killed at least 50% of the human subjects. So, health has to be understood in the same way that we understand every other aspect of society, of people under capitalism, how they are exploited, how they are used for profit and somehow or other, we have to find ways to educate the public away from the belief system that is as profound as any religion in the health industry, which is not health. It's all about medicine and profit and actually works on attacking our health. And so, this is something I really feel that has to be included in any of the work that we do on socialism and bringing in all these other groups of people that have been ignored, all these identities and all the different ways that people are exploitedand used for profit under capitalism and imperialism.
ANSWER
Alex Callinicos: I'll say something about the first two questions. First on Professor Roy's question. I think the, the concept of intersectionality is very useful in identifying the way in which different forms of oppression interweave. So, it's not just one form of oppression, but several for many, many people. But the concept doesn't tell us about what Nancy was called the structural relationship between these different forms of oppression, for example, as Nancy put it, how wage labor presupposes unpaid domestic labor in the home. And, of course, there has been quite a lot of work on those interrelations.
But I think that part of the problem is that it's a moving object. I live in London. if I think about the working class in London, one thing that's very striking is that the people who make up the manual public sector workforce, which a generation ago was overwhelmingly white are now increasingly Asian, Afro-Caribbean, African. And these aren't particularly underprivileged workers. They still often have trade union organization and so on and so forth. So that's a group of workers of colour who have become very important to the economy and to our lives, as we saw during the pandemic. There was a terrible death toll among bus drivers, for example.
But then I look out of the window and I see all these, these poor guys, and they are mainly guys, also of color, who are rushing around for Deliveroo, Uber and so on. The people doing the labour of the gig economy who are in a very different position structurally. And it's partly a problem of analytically grasping the differences, but also the interconnections between the different ways in which people are subsumed under wage labor, and then thinking politically--and not just thinking but trying political—to organize them or help them to get get organized, which is much easier and more straightforward, let's say in the public sector where there the traditions of trade union organization, but is only just starting, if we look at the gig economy. That's not a proper answer to those questions. But it's about how I think of the terrain. And it does imply that I agree with Nancy that we need to try and understand all sorts of phenomena that are seen simply dispersed but all belong to the same structured relations of exploitation.
QUESTIONS
Leo Gabriel: Good afternoon. I'm happy to be among so many like-minded friends because I discovered that we are approaching the same subject from different points of view, keeping our diversity And diversity is also the key element. According to me, I, who has been most of his life dealing with Latin American cultures where you can capture the cultural dimension within a structure than what the nation state has offered to us for two or more centuries. And I think what we could do and there I agree very much with Jayati Ghosh that we need to have an extreme effort of decentralization and that's the difference from the, let's say, old fashioned, Soviet Union type of socialism, so that we can recognize our difference within a common structure. And from that point go on, in order to have another dynamic. I don't believe very much in utopias in the sense of castles in the air, a fixed concept that you have to get to in an ideological way. I'm more for people of movement and movements. That's to say we have to go ahead, struggling for the realization of something.And we find our enemies on the way. So, I think just in Latin America, there are a lot of examples in the economic fields, which have been quite successful, like the one under the name of solidarity economics, participatory budget and others where you can really build something from the bottom up and not from top down. I think that is the most important. And if we agree on this form of procedure, then we can come to a convergence of different kinds which are now separated – a peace movement, the women's movement, the movement against climate change and so on. We could have this way, like little stones in a mosaic, which then eventually get together and produce a form. I don't know yet what the form is, but the struggle will say where we are heading. Thank you very much.
Steve Firebrand: Hi. Thank you very much for this conference. It's been really, really interesting. I agree with what the speakers have said about, identity politics and imperialism and so forth. I think one key weakness in the book is a rejection of the Leninist idea of a revolutionary party. I think that's exactly what is needed on the left today. We need to re-establish the real Marxist tradition, going back to self-emancipation, and re-establish organizations that put that forward and intervene in the class struggle and the struggle of the oppressed. To do that we need today to go out and organize the many thousands and thousands of people who are open to Marxist ideas but are not yet an organization. A key weakness, I think, on the left is the lack of actual revolutionary organization, which is founded on the basic principles of Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. These kinds of organizations are needed today to intervene in the struggles that are going on, both in terms of the struggle itself and in terms of the political battles around the issues that people have brought up. So, I think that re-establishing that tradition is important, and actually building Marxist cadre around those ideas and organization is, the key question and that that entails democratic centralism as well, to make that effective. And we can't shy away from that. We have to reestablish that as opposed to the so-called leftism of Stalinism and social democracy, which have become dominant on the left. And I think that's one of the key questions we have to face today. Thank you.
Francis King: Hello. Thanks, everybody. Very, very interesting conference. I'm Frances King. I'm the editor of the journal Socialist History. We're pleased to have Boris Kagarlitsky as one of our editorial advisors – I'm sure we're not the only journal in that position – as well as an occasional contributor. I want to talk a bit about the idea of the long retreat, because I come from the orthodox Communist tradition. And one of the things that we had, one of the great advantages that we had was an ability to point to what we imagined was a feasible, really existing model of an alternative society. An alternative mode of production. An alternative economic system in which we believed. In certain countries, quite a lot of people did. Others, like Britain, not so very many. It represented, if you like, at least the bare outline, the armature of a viable, feasible alternative system which we could recognize, which we could recommend to other people. And for the last four decades, the belief in the possibility of an alternative to capitalism, a viable alternative to capitalism, which can be built and we know is going to work, has largely dissipated.
And I think one thing which kind of under underlies a great part of this retreat is precisely that lack of belief. And so, we get this kind of fragmentation, which is represented in identity politics and that sort of thing, individual liberations, little struggles here and there and that sort of thing. But the overarching belief in the possibility, feasibility and, you know, realizability of an actual alternative mode of production that seems to be the one thing which used to exist and is now largely, largely missing. And how you actually deal with that? I don't have the answer. But without that, the socialist movement is kind of missing one of the most important assets it used to have in the past, but that it does not have now, something credible it can present to people who are not already convinced.
ANSWER
Alex Callinicos: First of all, let me also respond to Francis. Yeah, of course, there's the terrible incubus of what I'll call for the sake of simplicity, Stalinism that weighs down any left project. There's really good stuff in Boris's book where he tries to address the evolution and eventual breakdown of actually existing Stalinism, in the Soviet Union. It's a huge burden to carry. And I think that a lot of the list that Jayati more or less explicitly referenced relates to that experience. So, we had Steve putting forward, I think, a different understanding of democratic centralism to the one that Jayati was criticizing. But I quite understand, having encountered a bit the big Communist parties in India and also some of the also pretty big Maoist organizations, how that kind of mode of party building puts a lot of people off as a kind of replication of the original Stalinist model constructed in the 1920s. So, this is an enormous, enormous burden that we have to carry and shake off.
It seems to me that it's possible to at least partly shake that burden off. It's very interesting, for example, the support for socialism among younger people in the United States, despite the fall of the Soviet Union, despite the whole history of anti-communism. Why? We've been talking more about the problems of the left, but it's very obvious—this is part of the paradox that Boris addresses—that capitalism isn't working and indeed is taking increasingly destructive and. indeed, catastrophic forms. So, the idea of an alternative, I think, is enjoying some degree of recovery now. There's an important part of Boris's book where he discusses what a democratically planned economy would be like. Now that's very far away from where we are now. But while I agree on the virtues of decentralization, diversity, self-management and so on---I was with Leo Gabriel in Brazil at the height of the World Social Forum movement and the diversity that was enacted at those events was one of the great experiences of my life.
Nevertheless, if you're a socialist like Boris or me, you want to replace capitalism with a better social system. And that can't be done simply on the basis of decentralization and diversity. We have to replace the fossil fuel economy. That's a global task. You can't have a no carbon economy in one country. It's a global problem. And, therefore, replacing capitalism involves trying to imagine and begin to construct a global alternative. And that does mean talking about political forms, the returning to the form of the party and working out how what kind of effective and acceptable and democratic socialist party or socialist parties can be built in the in the 21st century. That has to be part of the kind of recipe that any anti-capitalist project has to offer in the 21st century. And one of the reasons why Boris is great is because he confronts those questions soberly and fairly systematically. I don't always agree with him, but it's very important that he does it. I'll leave it there.
Nancy Fraser: Thank you. Well, thanks to the three speakers, those were all really insightful and interesting comments. And I wanted to say something about the relation of gender, race and class, the primacy of class, the inadequacy, though, of dismissing race and gender as wokeism and so on. I think it's very important to distinguish between the structural plane at which we think about these issues and what some people here are calling the identity plane. And I want to just say on the structural plane, in my opinion, gender and race are not alternatives to class. They are divisions and differentiations within it which are structurally generated by capitalism itself. I alluded to this much too quickly in my earlier remarks. You cannot extract surplus value from doubly free workers in factories without somebody doing the unpaid social reproductive work that that produces them. And without somebody supplying below cost, raw materials, energy and other inputs. Du Bois was mentioned earlier: you don't have Manchester without Mississippi. Today you don't have Cupertino without Shenzhen and without Kinshasa. So, these are all imbricated across the globe.
I was trying to say to stress the heteroclite and diverse character of the global working class, but we should say more as Marxists than that it's diverse. We should be able to say something about what structurally makes it diverse and what structurally creates the divisions and appearances that gender and race are somehow, you know, not connected to class. This is what I was trying to get at, and my thought was that, to overcome fragmentation – it's an experiment, you know – how far could we get by redescribing a lot of issues around gender and around race and empire as labour issues. How far could we get in trying to reveal to the social actors themselves that gender and race are not epiphenomenal but are formations that are generated within the class structure of capitalism. I think that's a different position. But then the idea is that these are three things that we have to think about, take account of all of them, and it's certainly different from the idea that only class is real and fundamental. Thank you.
Devparna Roy: Thank you. I am Devparna Roy, associate professor of sociology at Nazareth University in Rochester, New York state, United States. I am very happy to be able to get the opportunity to speak with you all today. Thanks, Nancy, Alex, Bill and Jayati. The first point relates to the question of gender and race as I teach American undergraduates about race and ethnicity. I teach them about intersectionality, a concept that has been created by black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberlé Crenshaw. So, is there a way to infuse intersectionality concept with a structuralist perspective, and how would that help us combat what Nancy Fraser has correctly identified as a central question that the global left faces today? A second follow up question relates to the matter of de-growth. I haven't had the privilege to read Boris's book as yet, but does Boris deal with the question of de-growth? And could Professor Jayati Ghosh would kindly address the issue?
Tanya Marquette: I really appreciate the comments of everybody. And I don't know that I will sound as coherent as some of those who spoke. I'm in New York State. I have been a community organizer on different issues, predominantly on race, gender and health, for pretty much all my adult life. My concern is with some comments that Bill Fletcher made where he was using Covid as an example. And one of the things that I find with the left that's a real concern of mine is how while people on the left may understand corporatism and capitalism, they seem to have a segmented way of looking at health care, as if the health industry is different from any of the other industries. And one of the things that I have seen very clearly is that the medical industry, which is an industry no different than any of the others, has completely commoditized the human body for profit. And it has been done intentionally. Anybody who does research into that, which I have done quite a bit of, knows it was intentional. It has focused on only supporting drugs that can be patented for profit, which means that it attacks anything natural. It will rape the environment for natural products that they can then turn into patented drugs. There's a long history of that, and Covid is the perfect example of how an entire population has been brought under control.
As I think a Belgian psychologist wrote, his name is Matthias Desmet, this is mass formation gaining complete control of the population in order to subordinate them to the needs of the corporate class. The studies on Covid, on the drugs that are used have been fictional. They've been fraudulent. They have been used intentionally to depopulate the world. The one million deaths in this country are mainly from the drugs that were used, called vaccines and treatments such as ventilators and remdesivir, a drug that in many tests killed at least 50% of the human subjects. So, health has to be understood in the same way that we understand every other aspect of society, of people under capitalism, how they are exploited, how they are used for profit and somehow or other, we have to find ways to educate the public away from the belief system that is as profound as any religion in the health industry, which is not health. It's all about medicine and profit and actually works on attacking our health. And so, this is something I really feel that has to be included in any of the work that we do on socialism and bringing in all these other groups of people that have been ignored, all these identities and all the different ways that people are exploitedand used for profit under capitalism and imperialism.
ANSWER
Alex Callinicos: I'll say something about the first two questions. First on Professor Roy's question. I think the, the concept of intersectionality is very useful in identifying the way in which different forms of oppression interweave. So, it's not just one form of oppression, but several for many, many people. But the concept doesn't tell us about what Nancy was called the structural relationship between these different forms of oppression, for example, as Nancy put it, how wage labor presupposes unpaid domestic labor in the home. And, of course, there has been quite a lot of work on those interrelations.
But I think that part of the problem is that it's a moving object. I live in London. if I think about the working class in London, one thing that's very striking is that the people who make up the manual public sector workforce, which a generation ago was overwhelmingly white are now increasingly Asian, Afro-Caribbean, African. And these aren't particularly underprivileged workers. They still often have trade union organization and so on and so forth. So that's a group of workers of colour who have become very important to the economy and to our lives, as we saw during the pandemic. There was a terrible death toll among bus drivers, for example.
But then I look out of the window and I see all these, these poor guys, and they are mainly guys, also of color, who are rushing around for Deliveroo, Uber and so on. The people doing the labour of the gig economy who are in a very different position structurally. And it's partly a problem of analytically grasping the differences, but also the interconnections between the different ways in which people are subsumed under wage labor, and then thinking politically--and not just thinking but trying political—to organize them or help them to get get organized, which is much easier and more straightforward, let's say in the public sector where there the traditions of trade union organization, but is only just starting, if we look at the gig economy. That's not a proper answer to those questions. But it's about how I think of the terrain. And it does imply that I agree with Nancy that we need to try and understand all sorts of phenomena that are seen simply dispersed but all belong to the same structured relations of exploitation.
QUESTIONS
Leo Gabriel: Good afternoon. I'm happy to be among so many like-minded friends because I discovered that we are approaching the same subject from different points of view, keeping our diversity And diversity is also the key element. According to me, I, who has been most of his life dealing with Latin American cultures where you can capture the cultural dimension within a structure than what the nation state has offered to us for two or more centuries. And I think what we could do and there I agree very much with Jayati Ghosh that we need to have an extreme effort of decentralization and that's the difference from the, let's say, old fashioned, Soviet Union type of socialism, so that we can recognize our difference within a common structure. And from that point go on, in order to have another dynamic. I don't believe very much in utopias in the sense of castles in the air, a fixed concept that you have to get to in an ideological way. I'm more for people of movement and movements. That's to say we have to go ahead, struggling for the realization of something.And we find our enemies on the way. So, I think just in Latin America, there are a lot of examples in the economic fields, which have been quite successful, like the one under the name of solidarity economics, participatory budget and others where you can really build something from the bottom up and not from top down. I think that is the most important. And if we agree on this form of procedure, then we can come to a convergence of different kinds which are now separated – a peace movement, the women's movement, the movement against climate change and so on. We could have this way, like little stones in a mosaic, which then eventually get together and produce a form. I don't know yet what the form is, but the struggle will say where we are heading. Thank you very much.
Steve Firebrand: Hi. Thank you very much for this conference. It's been really, really interesting. I agree with what the speakers have said about, identity politics and imperialism and so forth. I think one key weakness in the book is a rejection of the Leninist idea of a revolutionary party. I think that's exactly what is needed on the left today. We need to re-establish the real Marxist tradition, going back to self-emancipation, and re-establish organizations that put that forward and intervene in the class struggle and the struggle of the oppressed. To do that we need today to go out and organize the many thousands and thousands of people who are open to Marxist ideas but are not yet an organization. A key weakness, I think, on the left is the lack of actual revolutionary organization, which is founded on the basic principles of Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. These kinds of organizations are needed today to intervene in the struggles that are going on, both in terms of the struggle itself and in terms of the political battles around the issues that people have brought up. So, I think that re-establishing that tradition is important, and actually building Marxist cadre around those ideas and organization is, the key question and that that entails democratic centralism as well, to make that effective. And we can't shy away from that. We have to reestablish that as opposed to the so-called leftism of Stalinism and social democracy, which have become dominant on the left. And I think that's one of the key questions we have to face today. Thank you.
Francis King: Hello. Thanks, everybody. Very, very interesting conference. I'm Frances King. I'm the editor of the journal Socialist History. We're pleased to have Boris Kagarlitsky as one of our editorial advisors – I'm sure we're not the only journal in that position – as well as an occasional contributor. I want to talk a bit about the idea of the long retreat, because I come from the orthodox Communist tradition. And one of the things that we had, one of the great advantages that we had was an ability to point to what we imagined was a feasible, really existing model of an alternative society. An alternative mode of production. An alternative economic system in which we believed. In certain countries, quite a lot of people did. Others, like Britain, not so very many. It represented, if you like, at least the bare outline, the armature of a viable, feasible alternative system which we could recognize, which we could recommend to other people. And for the last four decades, the belief in the possibility of an alternative to capitalism, a viable alternative to capitalism, which can be built and we know is going to work, has largely dissipated.
And I think one thing which kind of under underlies a great part of this retreat is precisely that lack of belief. And so, we get this kind of fragmentation, which is represented in identity politics and that sort of thing, individual liberations, little struggles here and there and that sort of thing. But the overarching belief in the possibility, feasibility and, you know, realizability of an actual alternative mode of production that seems to be the one thing which used to exist and is now largely, largely missing. And how you actually deal with that? I don't have the answer. But without that, the socialist movement is kind of missing one of the most important assets it used to have in the past, but that it does not have now, something credible it can present to people who are not already convinced.
ANSWER
Alex Callinicos: First of all, let me also respond to Francis. Yeah, of course, there's the terrible incubus of what I'll call for the sake of simplicity, Stalinism that weighs down any left project. There's really good stuff in Boris's book where he tries to address the evolution and eventual breakdown of actually existing Stalinism, in the Soviet Union. It's a huge burden to carry. And I think that a lot of the list that Jayati more or less explicitly referenced relates to that experience. So, we had Steve putting forward, I think, a different understanding of democratic centralism to the one that Jayati was criticizing. But I quite understand, having encountered a bit the big Communist parties in India and also some of the also pretty big Maoist organizations, how that kind of mode of party building puts a lot of people off as a kind of replication of the original Stalinist model constructed in the 1920s. So, this is an enormous, enormous burden that we have to carry and shake off.
It seems to me that it's possible to at least partly shake that burden off. It's very interesting, for example, the support for socialism among younger people in the United States, despite the fall of the Soviet Union, despite the whole history of anti-communism. Why? We've been talking more about the problems of the left, but it's very obvious—this is part of the paradox that Boris addresses—that capitalism isn't working and indeed is taking increasingly destructive and. indeed, catastrophic forms. So, the idea of an alternative, I think, is enjoying some degree of recovery now. There's an important part of Boris's book where he discusses what a democratically planned economy would be like. Now that's very far away from where we are now. But while I agree on the virtues of decentralization, diversity, self-management and so on---I was with Leo Gabriel in Brazil at the height of the World Social Forum movement and the diversity that was enacted at those events was one of the great experiences of my life.
Nevertheless, if you're a socialist like Boris or me, you want to replace capitalism with a better social system. And that can't be done simply on the basis of decentralization and diversity. We have to replace the fossil fuel economy. That's a global task. You can't have a no carbon economy in one country. It's a global problem. And, therefore, replacing capitalism involves trying to imagine and begin to construct a global alternative. And that does mean talking about political forms, the returning to the form of the party and working out how what kind of effective and acceptable and democratic socialist party or socialist parties can be built in the in the 21st century. That has to be part of the kind of recipe that any anti-capitalist project has to offer in the 21st century. And one of the reasons why Boris is great is because he confronts those questions soberly and fairly systematically. I don't always agree with him, but it's very important that he does it. I'll leave it there.
