Social Bases of Resistance

Critiques of capitalism, if they are to make any political sense, must have—or find—a social base. From the nineteenth century through to the twentieth, the most salient critique was dubbed ‘the workers’ question’, for its mass base was to be found in the rising industrial working class. It was an issue not merely for the emerging labour organizations and their occasional Liberal sympathizers, but also for conservative opinion; even the fascists, the most violent enemies of the labour movement, modelled their organizations after its example. Industrial workers maintained their centrality up to the 1970s. By then a further social base for anti-capitalist struggle had emerged in the anti-colonial movements, mobilized around the issue of national liberation and against imperialist ‘dependent development’. Over the past thirty years, however, de-industrialization in the North has halted and reversed the forward march of labour; here, the ‘grand dialectic’—that is: the clash between the increasingly social character of the forces of production and their private ownership—has been suspended. Meanwhile, the successful industrialization of leading countries in the South during the same period has so far largely meant that capitalist development is now seen as possible in Asia, Africa and Latin America, contrary to once influential dependency theories. Are there, then, any rising social forces today that could be functionally equivalent to the organized working classes or the anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century? Clearly, there are no mass anti-capitalist layers visible at present—a novel situation for capitalism, in the context of the past 150 years. However, if we look not for anti-capitalist movements but rather for mass formations that are potentially critical of contemporary capitalist development, important social forces are making themselves manifest. We can distinguish four different kinds.

From the margins The first potentially critical social force consists of pre-capitalist populations, resisting the intrusions of big business. Indigenous peoples, recently somewhat empowered, are the main subject here. They are politically significant above all in Andean America and in India, but are present across much of the South and have developed international networks. They lack both the numbers and the resources to carry much weight, except locally; but their struggles can be articulated with wider critical movements of resistance. At present they are a force to be reckoned with in Bolivia, as the main component of a fractious governing coalition, and in India, as the core of a large-scale insurgency; in both cases encadrés by organizers from the labour-movement tradition—laid-off socialist miners turned coca growers in Bolivia, and Maoist professional revolutionaries in central India. The latter have taken a severe beating recently, but they have not been defeated or destroyed. In Mexico, the Zapatistas still hold the Lacandona region of Chiapas. Such mobilizations can be contradictory: in Communist-ruled West Bengal, peasants defending their land against industrial development projects blocked a Chinese-style turn and propelled a right-wing regime into power. The second, largely extra-capitalist, critical force is made up of the hundreds of millions of landless peasants, casual labourers and street vendors who constitute the vast slum populations in many parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. (Their equivalents in the North might be the growing numbers of marginalized youth, both native and immigrant, outside the employment nexus.) Potentially, they constitute a major source of destabilization for capitalism. The pent-up anger and violence of these layers have often proved explosive, sometimes viciously so, in ethnic pogroms or just riotous vandalism. However, these ‘wretched of the earth’ have also been involved in struggles against evictions and for access to water and electricity; they played a significant part in the 2011 Arab revolts and in the anti-austerity, anti-government protests along the northern Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts—Greece, Spain, Bulgaria, Romania. Under what conditions might these forces connect with any viable socio-economic alternative? It’s clear that any such critical alternative would have to speak directly to their fundamental concerns—their existential collective identity and their means of livelihood. It would need to develop modes of communication reaching deep into these popular strata, generating charismatic leaders with broad relay networks, personal as well as electronic. As the urban population in particular is unlikely to be organized, this potentially critical force will not spring into action without a focal triggering event, the nature of which is impossible to predict. The everyday dialectic of capitalist wage-work is, of course, still very much with us, even if it has been geographically reconfigured. The residual industrial working class in the North remains too weak to pose any anti-capitalist challenge; but austerity and capitalist offensives are generating short-horizon protests, not least in France, where organized labour threatened to disrupt petrol supplies in 2010 and steelworkers occupied plants in 2012. The new manufacturing workers in China, Bangladesh, Indonesia and elsewhere in the South may be in a better position to raise anti-capitalist demands, but their position is weakened by the vast supply of labour, and they are already being overtaken by more fragmented service-sector employment patterns. Repeated attempts to form labour parties, from Nigeria to Indonesia, have foundered; the only success over the past thirty years has been the Brazilian pt. South Korea and South Africa both possess important, union-based labour movements, but they lack strong political articulations: the South African unions are overshadowed by the nature of anc rule, the Korean ones undermined by petty factionalism, which torpedoed a well-developed project for a united left party in late 2012. While the class struggles in the South have been successful in winning wage rises and, to some extent, less gruesome working conditions, they seem unlikely to develop into a more systemic challenge. In East Asia, in particular, industrial capitalism is delivering higher levels of consumption, in a way that slower-developing European economies took much longer to achieve. True, Communist Party rule in China and Vietnam means that an anti-capitalist turn is not inconceivable—and would be feasible, if attempted. Yet for this to happen would require both a halt to growth and effective working-class mobilization against the enormous inequality the system has generated, which threatens the ‘harmony’ or social cohesion of Communist capitalism. This is imaginable but highly improbable, at least in the medium term. A more promising scenario may lie in connecting workplace struggles with community ones, over housing, health, education or civil rights.

White-collar masses A fourth, potentially critical, social force may now be emerging within the polarizing dialectic of financialized capitalism. Middle-class layers, crucially including students, played a leading role in the movements of 2011—Spain, Greece, the Arab Mashrek, Chile, as well as the weaker Occupy protests in North America and northern Europe—and the Turkish and Brazilian protests of 2013. These eruptions brought both middle-class and popular youth onto the streets, and in some instances their parents as well, against corrupt, exclusivist, socially polarizing capitalist systems. They did not manage to encroach on the power of capital, though 2011 brought two governments down. Yet they may prove to have been dress rehearsals for the dramas to come. Discourse about the new middle classes has grown into an avalanche over the past decade. In and about Africa, Asia and Latin America it is predominantly triumphalist—about Eastern Europe, often more cautious—proclaiming the arrival of mass markets of solvent consumers. Whether right or wrong, class discourses are always socially significant, so the global surge of middle-class discourse is a noteworthy symptom of the 2010s. For the most part it does not point to any critical social dialectic; on the contrary, it generally applauds the triumph of consumerism. The working class is vanishing from Chinese and Vietnamese Communist Party documents, while in German-led Europe the ideal of an ‘entrepreneurial society’ has replaced the mid-twentieth century self-image of the ‘wage-earner society’. Political commentators generally see the middle classes as a promising foundation for ‘sound’ economics and liberal democracy, though thoughtful economists, particularly in Brazil, have stressed the fragility of ‘middle-classness’ and the ever-present risk of poverty to which many are exposed. In the us, by contrast, the prevailing tone is of worry about the middle class’s decline in economic status and social weight. Western Europe has not followed quite the same pattern: the notion of the middle class here has always tended to be more circumscribed than in the Americas or Asia—including post-Maoist China—because of the established discursive presence of a working class. Outside Europe, the new conception of the middle class now encompasses the vast mass of the population which stands between the very poor and the wealthy, with the poverty line frequently set as income or expenditure of $2, $4 or $10 a day, while the upper limit excludes only the richest 5 or 10 per cent. In contrast to the industrial working class, the heteroclite aggregate known as the ‘middle class’ is the bearer of no specific relations of production, and harbours no particular developmental tendencies, apart from discretionary consumption. Yet however it is defined, the middle class—or substantial parts of it—has already demonstrated its ability to become a significant political actor, its salience growing with the decline or disorganization of the industrial proletariat. The rising middle classes of the Global South merit particularly close attention, for they can be crucial in determining political options. Precisely because of the social indeterminacy of the middle classes, their weight may be thrown in different, indeed opposite directions. The mobilized middle class was a major force behind Pinochet’s coup in Chile, while its Venezuelan counterpart supported a failed attempt to overthrow Hugo Chávez in 2002, and the well-heeled ‘Yellow Shirts’ of Bangkok brought down the government in Thailand six years later. As twentieth-century European history shows, the middle class is no intrinsic force for democracy. However, it has also been a source of pressure for democratic change, playing an important role in Taiwan and South Korea during the 1980s—alongside industrial workers—and in Eastern Europe in 1989. It was a central force in Cairo and Tunis in 2011, and a supporter of popular street protests in Greece, Spain, Chile and Brazil in 2011–13. The volatility of middle-class politics is vividly illustrated by the sharp turns in Egypt, from acclamation of democracy to adulation of the military and its mounting repression of dissent, effectively condoning the restoration of the ancien régime minus Mubarak. But critical interventions by middle-class forces can manifest themselves in the electoral arena, too. In 2012 Mexico City, with a population the size of a mid-level European state, elected a left-wing mayor for the fourth consecutive term; the successful candidate, Miguel Ángel Mancera, won almost 64 per cent of the vote, suggesting an inclusive popular bloc. In India, the trajectory of the Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party remains to be determined. The spectacular advance of the aap and its leader, Arvind Kejriwal, was due to a novel alliance that linked middle-class anti-corruption protestors with a set of concrete proposals on access to water and other public services that could benefit broader layers. The new party swept leafy New Delhi, as well as nine of the twelve ‘scheduled caste’ constituencies, to take the capital’s government in late 2013—only to step down 49 days later, as legislative efforts to curb graft stalled for lack of central government approval. In Indonesia a reformist candidate, Jokovi, won the governorship of Jakarta in 2013 against both the local establishment and a vicious sectarian-religious campaign—his chosen running mate was a Chinese Christian—on a platform of extending education and health services, as well as promoting ‘entrepreneurial urbanism’. Here, too, the strength and effectiveness of the class alliances—their ability to deliver tangible improvements for the popular masses—remain to be seen.