Karl Marx's writings on and ideas about social transformation have figured prominently in the Global Left imagination for more than 150 years. Regardless of political hue, scholars, activists and politicos, on the Left and the Right, have engaged with Marx's and Marxists’ ideas in some form or another. Marxism's extraordinary influence has been twofold: as a set of analytical ideas and as an ideology influencing the practices of political movements. History is littered with examples of Marx's impact on the world: Marxist-inspired working-class organisations in Europe and the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European socialist and communist parties’ lineages of Marxism, Marxist–Leninist political organisations of the twentieth century, Latin American dependency theory's influence on development, Marxism– Leninism in the Soviet Union and Marxist-influenced anti-colonial struggles (for example, in Vietnam, Angola and Mozambique). Whereas Marxist ideas have clearly had enormous impact on the world, many of these experiments have inglorious histories, culminating in the demise of the Soviet Union. At the end of the twentieth century a number of factors seemed to converge to mark the end of Marxism's influence on the world: the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chinese and Vietnamese move to market capitalism, the shift away from class-based issues to the dominance of identity politics in social movements, and the rise of postmodernism in academia with its anti-Marxist conceptions of power, alienation and marginalisation. As a result, by the late twentieth century the relevance of Marxism was under question.

Neoclassical economists and liberal political theorists were triumphant in the post-cold-war 1990s, not only declaring Marxian ideas dead but that there was no alternative to neoliberalism. Unlike what Marx (and the classical Marxists of the Second International) had predicted, the stages of history did not lead to an emancipated communism, but rather perambulated from capitalism to an even fiercer form of capitalism (for some this journey went via ‘state socialism’). Thus, by the turn of the century, it seemed clear that Marxism was, if not already dead, clearly dying an ignominious death. Neoliberal capitalism and the concomitant penetration of the market into all spheres of social life seemed well entrenched for the foreseeable future.

What should we do with Marxism? For most the answer is simple. Bury it! Mainstream social science has long since bid farewell to Marxism. Talcott Parsons (1967: 135) dismissed Marxism as a theory whose significance was entirely confined to the nineteenth century – a version of nineteenth-century utilitarianism of no relevance to the twentieth century. Ironically enough, he penned these reflections in 1968 in the midst of a major revival of Marxist thought across the globe – a revival that rejected Soviet Marxism as a ruling ideology, a revival that reclaimed Marxism's democratic and prefigurative legacy. The revival did not last long but suffered setbacks as revolutionary hopes were vanquished by repression and dictatorship and then by market fundamentalism. With the final collapse of the Soviet order in 1991, and the simultaneous market transition in China, the gravediggers pronounced Marxism finally dead and bells tolled across the world.

Facing such anti-Marxist euphoria, the last hold-outs often appear dogmatic and anachronistic. Marxists have, indeed, sometimes obliged their enemies by demonstrating their religious fervour in tracts that bear little relation to reality, defending Marxism in its pristine form, revealed in the scriptures of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The disciples that followed Marx and Engels – Lenin, Plekhanov, Trotsky, Bukharin, Luxemburg, Kautsky, Lukács, Gramsci, Fanon, Amin, Mao – were but a gloss on biblical readings of origins. Today's epigones do not place Marx and Engels in their context, as fallible beings whose thought reflected the period in which they lived, but as Christ-like figures and thus the source of eternal truth. In their view the founders can speak no falsehood.

Adopting neither burial nor revelation, a third approach to Marxism has been more measured. Many in the social sciences and beyond have appropriated what they consider salvageable, which might include Marxism's analysis of the creative power of capitalism, the notions of exploitation and class struggle, the idea of primitive accumulation, or even Marxist views of ideology and the state. These neo-Marxists and post-Marxists often combine the ideas of Marx and Marxism with those of other social theorists – Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, Simone de Beauvoir, Catharine MacKinnon and so on.

One of the most contentious and neglected issues in Marxism is the content, role and place of democracy in transformative visions and practices. For some, Marxism is antithetical to democracy; for others, vanguard democracy represents the pinnacle of Marxism, and still others pay little attention to democracy at all. Marxism has gone through different phases, each phase with its unique social base and foundational ideas. At the time of the Second and Third Internationals, Marxism's social base was largely in working-class movements and parties, but shifted from the 1950s onwards to intellectuals overwhelmingly located in universities. This growth of and engagement with Marxism among intellectuals was in part due to the phenomenal growth and influence of university education (Hobsbawm 2011: 360). After reaching the peak of its influence in the academy during the 1970s, Marxism weakened through the course of the 1990s. In the late 1990s, however, a renewed interest in Marxism emerged among multi-class movements, middle- and working-class activists and intellectuals. These diverse social strata do not necessarily converge in their understandings of history, or their views of the causes and consequences of the dynamics of capitalism, but rather, share in their belief that ‘another world is possible’.

This is the context within which I focus this chapter on literature – both liberal and Marxist – that has explicitly engaged the issue of democracy. Because Marxist influence over the last half-century has largely emanated from intellectuals located within universities, I focus on the various ways in which liberal and Marxist scholars have placed democracy against and within Marxism. While democracy is a contested concept that often incorporates very different notions of social change and control, with various actors and processes, twentiethcentury liberals and Marxists tended to focus on representative and vanguard democracy respectively, largely ignoring the importance of direct and participatory democracy. Bertrand Russell (1946: 14) pithily captured the central distinction: the Western understanding of democracy ‘is that it consists in the rule of the majority; the Russian view is that it consists in the interests of the majority’. Neither tradition emphasised government by the people. The bifurcation of democracy into representative democracy versus vanguard democracy severely limited the debate on democracy in the twentieth century.

The political dynamics of contemporary South Africa are rife with contradiction. On the one hand, it is among the most consistently contentious places on earth, with insurgent communities capable of mounting disruptive protest on a nearly constant basis, rooted in the poor areas of the half-dozen major cities as well as neglected and multiply oppressed black residential areas of declining towns. On the other hand, even the best-known contemporary South African social movements, for all their sound, lack a certain measure of fury.

In the face of the government's embrace of neoliberal social policies since shortly after the fall of apartheid, what are often called ‘service delivery protests’ occurring many thousands of times a year according to police statistics (Duncan and Vally 2008; Mottiar and Bond 2011) are at once the site of poor people's demands for greater responsiveness to human needs in general, but are also intensely localised and self-limited in their politics. The upsurge of protest since the late 1990s invariably invokes images of the anti-apartheid struggle and thus focuses analysis on continuities and breaks between the old anti-apartheid mass action and the new mass action in post-apartheid society. And yet the majority of community protesters operate in close interconnection with parts of the Tripartite Alliance, composed of the African National Congress (ANC), the trade union movement represented by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) and so the line between insurgencies and governing organisations is not always clear. Yet their geographic and political isolation from one another have contributed to their having little leverage over the Alliance, which notwithstanding some resistance by unions and communists, embraced neoliberal policies in the transition from anti-apartheid resistance to class-apartheid government in 1994.

But beyond the community protests, in many respects, the problems that have faced more traditional radical social movements in South Africa are familiar to students of social movements elsewhere: the problems of moving from movement to governing; of co-optation and shifting roles vis-à-vis the state; of the limits of localism and the problem of how to join communityand workplace-based organising to forge a strong working-class politics.

In this moment of economic and ecological crisis a feminist anti-capitalist politics could generate a transnational solidarity that is larger and more powerful than anything we have yet seen. Such a politics requires both Marxism for its trenchant critique of capitalism and the class inequalities essential to it and feminism for its commitment to gender equality. Both require a commitment to anti-racism. In this chapter we trace the uneasy relations between Marxism and feminism showing the contributions each has made to the other and argue that the success of the current Marxist revitalisation hinges on a more equal relationship. This integration is best described as a socialist feminism based on the understanding that ‘the liberation of women depends on the liberation of all people’ (Rowbotham 1972: 11).

Feminism is both an intellectual project and a political movement, so its theoretical debates are also political and strategic. Feminists tend to be drawn together by their commitment to oppose women's oppression, but they are also engaged with different theoretical and political paradigms, differences that are sometimes obscured by the apparent unity of ‘feminist theory’. There are multiple ‘feminisms’. Typically, mid- to late twentieth-century feminism included several distinct political currents: liberal feminism aspiring to formal legal equality and access to equal opportunities with men; radical feminism, which assumed that unequal gender relations are the primary contradiction of social organisation and that women's oppression underlies all other inequalities; Marxist feminism, which assumed that women's liberation depended on overthrowing or dismantling capitalism; and socialist feminism which combined the historical materialism of Marxism with an analysis of gender-based inequalities.

In an influential intervention published over thirty years ago, Heidi Hartmann complained that the relationship between Marxism and feminism was marked by extreme inequality. She compared it to the marriage between husband and wife depicted in English common law at the time: ‘Marxism and feminism are one, and that one is Marxism’. She concluded that ‘either we need a healthier marriage or we need a divorce’ (Hartmann 1981: 2). Her hope for a healthier marriage was based on a conviction that each had strengths the other needed:

At the heart of South Africa's national liberation struggle was the constitution of a future South African nation in which white domination would be defeated. From the 1960s the Oliver Tambo-led African National Congress (ANC) increasingly used Marxist tools to develop its analysis of the South African social formation that had been shaped by three centuries of colonial dispossession and close to a century of capitalist development. The ANC defined and characterised this social formation as a ‘colonialism of a special type’ (CST) in which all classes and strata of black people were oppressed on the basis of their race. According to the ANC, what was needed to free black people from this national oppression was a multi-class revolutionary front uniting all the oppressed in prosecuting a national democratic revolution (NDR). This ANC theorisation of the social formation and the required political strategy also asserted the crucial and leading role of the working class in the revolutionary process and that the struggle for national liberation would be incomplete without fundamentally and systematically shaking the roots of racialised capitalism in South Africa, even though the ANC did not necessarily mean, or accept the necessity of, a transition to socialism. In essence, the ANC's use of Marxism was vanguardist and shaped by Stalinised/sovietised influences that were transmitted to it through leading members of the South African Communist Party (SACP) who, from the 1960s, dominated ANC theoretical perspectives.

What has become of the ANC's use of Marxism? What do the nineteen years of post-apartheid ANC rule and nation-building say about the scope and limits of the ANC's ‘Marxism’? This chapter critically engages with the CST thesis and shows that the ANC's continued use of Marxism has been transformed into attempts to hegemonise and marry the working class to a project to transnationalise and deracialise South African capitalism. This has been through what the chapter describes as an Afro-neoliberal project that defines the ANC in government today. In addition to this critique of the limits of Afro-neoliberalism in resolving the national question, the chapter takes the argument further by reviewing how the ANC's nation-building project has failed to grapple with racialised post-apartheid social struggles over housing in the Western Cape. The chapter provides a second case study, which reviews sustained ANC government legislative efforts to retribalise the former bantustan countryside against the logic of a progressive nation-building project.

Africa joined three other continents in the twentieth century's experiment in Marxist–Leninist governance. The first African regimes to claim Marxism as one source of inspiration were established in the late 1950s with the commencement of the European decolonisation of Africa, some forty years after Russia's October Revolution. The first orthodox Marxist–Leninist regimes appeared in the early 1960s, with the orthodox tide cresting in the mid- to late 1970s. The Marxist– Leninist regimes dissolved at the beginning of the 1990s, their dissolution by then just one moment in the global ‘collapse of communism’. These regimes are of enduring historical interest, but their experience also yields lessons for those seeking a progressive or egalitarian way forward for twenty-first-century Africa.

The experience of Marxist–Leninist governance was disastrous by virtually any defensible metric. The lessons it offers for contemporary social democrats and democratic socialists are thus largely negative. New generations of activists and intellectuals in South Africa and elsewhere often seem too ready to forget or deny these in their rush to embrace slogans, concepts and iconography reminiscent of authoritarian rather than democratic socialism.

Bearing in mind both the historical interest value of Africa's Marxist regimes and the need, more than two decades after their demise, to learn what we can from their failures, I offer below seven theses about Africa's Marxist–Leninist governments and the movements undergirding them.

The theses refer to the doctrines and practices of parties, movements and political currents that claimed to be Marxist and were guided to a significant degree by particular interpretations of Marxist theory. The chapter does not address academic Marxism, and it sidesteps the question of whether these regimes were ‘truly’ Marxist, whether they correctly interpreted the canon or indeed whether it constitutes a category error to refer to a regime as Marxist (as opposed to, say, popular-democratic or socialist). I do, however, conclude with some critical comments on Marxist theory as such and take the view that Marxist theory is probably implicated, along with other factors, in the failure of the ‘Marxist regimes’.

THESIS ONE

There was no clear qualitative difference between the levels of radicalism displayed by the Marxist–Leninist regimes and the preceding African socialist ones.

Critique, we have recently been told, has ‘run out of steam’, making it a poor weapon for engaging in contemporary theoretical battles. Worse still, not only does critique appear blunted, even anachronistic, but the enemy is wise to the critical trick and has turned its back on ‘our’ forces. Field marshals of the academy are even calling for a regrouping, a new assessment of the strategic disposition that has come down to us via the critical tradition (see Latour 2004).

Today, even in politics, there is less patience for interventions that take a critical form (and which cannot always be dismissed as a capitulation to power). For instance, in my own experience, criticism of dominant political narratives and practices are often met with the objection: ‘Your criticisms are all very well and good, but what does it say about the alternative?’

If we (sometimes) concede the sincerity of such statements, and admit the need to direct ourselves towards finding an alternative, why should we bother with critique? ‘Write all the critical words you want,’ they might even say, ‘but it's the new world that we're really interested in.’

By presenting the problem in these terms, I do not mean to suggest that we all, and always, mean the same thing when we talk about critique or criticism. Summarising the wide spectrum of practices that go under the name ‘critique’, a recent contribution by Michael Hardt (2011: 19) speaks of ‘relatively generic means of fault-finding; methods to question the truth of authority; techniques to reveal the figures of power that operate in dominant discourses or ideologies; and even specific Kantian procedures of investigating the human understanding, reason, or judgment’. Nevertheless, for Hardt (2011: 19), in spite of the differences between ways of doing critique – conceived in his paper as the primary mode of practising theory as political intervention – they all remain open to the charge of being ‘insufficient as political methods in so far as they lack the capacity both to transform the existing structures of power and create alternative social arrangements’.

For the past four decades historical Marxism as a body of social thought and radical practice has been systematically attacked. The cold war, the triumphalism of the liberal world after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the spread of a hegemonic common sense naturalising financialised capitalism (in everyday life as credit-driven consumption and as unadulterated greed), the prejudice of the liberal media and the weaknesses of authoritarian vanguardist Marxism have all contributed to discrediting Marxism and even erasing its presence in public discourse, in many countries. However, the deep anti-Marxism of our time is unhinging in the midst of the deepest and most multifaceted systemic crises of modern capitalism. Not only are the limits and contradictions of globalised capitalism apparent for all to see, but the making of deep inequalities, hunger, mass unemployment, ecological crisis and growing violence are reaffirming a class politics and understanding of our social world.

The spectre of Marxism is back but this time freed from the cage of orthodoxy or dogma. Although those who believe Marxism is always right, does not have weaknesses and has all the answers (‘zombie Marxists’), will continue to exist and will also make an appearance in this conjuncture. The world, however, is no longer starry-eyed in the presence of such a radicalism. In the ferment of transnational activism, within the World Social Forum and with the rise of a new Global Left, a heterodox anti-capitalism has come to the fore, open to various resources of critique, imagining different ways of exiting capitalism and consciously seeking a democratic way forward rather than the ‘correct line’. A non-dogmatic and democratic Marxism is finding its way in this context. This volume has provided a glimpse of such a Marxism: its new axes of renewal, themes and challenges.

BEYOND VANGUARD MARXISM

Marxism being in crisis is not new. Even its death has been proclaimed many times in the last century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the first crisis of Marxism emerged in the context of mass working-class politics and movements. The looming onset of World War I and positions on imperialist war – reform versus revolution, vanguard versus mass party – were all sources of deep contention and contributed to the crisis of Marxism at that time. After 1917, the Russian Revolution spawned a society that became an object of critical enquiry on the Left.

There is now increased recognition of the severity of the ecological crisis facing our planet, to the extent that even the president of a leading industrialised nation recently questioned the growth/consumption paradigm based on the abundant availability of natural resources, in particular fossil fuels such as oil. The sustainability of economic growth is in doubt because of the rapid depletion of non-renewable fossil fuels (particularly peak oil) and because of carbon emissions from the use of these fossil fuels in production and consumption processes. This has caused climate change resulting in, amongst other things, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, floods, drought and a host of other human-induced ‘natural’ disasters which can destroy the earth as we know it (Gore 2009; Magdoff and Foster 2011). In addition, other pollutants from industrial processes, such as acid mine drainage, acid rain and other toxins have polluted the air and rivers, destroying livelihoods and causing a wide range of public health problems, including new diseases that modern medicine is unable to cure (Hallowes 2011). The rapid advancement of industrial and urban growth is also destroying delicate local ecosystems, making a wide range of flora and fauna extinct, thus threatening the planet's precious biodiversity that holds the key to much of the hitherto-unknown inner workings of the entire ecosystem that governs the earth's existence (Cock 2007).

This ‘eco-logic’ of industrial capitalism (Friedman 2008) is an intricate web of economic and ecological processes that feed off each other, with very specific social consequences. While the social critique of capitalism (pivoted around the capital–labour contradiction) is associated with Marxist and neo-Marxist paradigms that have emerged over the past century and a half, the ecological critique has been mainly the preserve of environmentalists who have drawn inspiration from non-Western thought (including Native American and Eastern philosophical thought). Indeed, Marx and the varieties of Marxism that flowed out of his thinking over the past century have usually been lumped together with other products of the Enlightenment, allegedly sharing a similar anthropocentric belief in the domination of nature (itself a product of Christian thinking), but departing from Christianity in its belief in the wonders of science and technology and the idea of historical progress (Barry 2004; Ponting 2007).

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), one of the most original Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century, was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's regime in 1926 for his radical ideas and his leadership of the Italian Communist Party. He began writing his highly influential Prison Notebooks in 1929, the year the New York Stock Exchange crashed and capitalism entered the ‘Great Depression’. A central aspect of the problematic informing the Prison Notebooks is the ability of capitalism to reproduce itself through ruling-class strategies. At the same time, Gramsci's Prison Notebooks pondered how to elaborate a politics capable of transforming capitalism without degenerating into revolutionary voluntarism on the one hand, and economic determinism on the other. Today the world is living through the ‘Great Depression’ of the twenty-first century. In this context, drawing on Gramsci's theoretical corpus critically is extremely important to provide insight into the nature of the hegemonic crisis of capital; how ruling classes are responding to this crisis and how struggles for alternatives can be waged.

I begin this chapter by clarifying which Gramscian Marxism has to be transnationalised. This is important, given that Gramsci's own Marxism has been overlayed and in some senses obscured by varied interpretations, readings and sometimes abuses. Within twentieth-century Marxism, Gramsci has been reduced to a Western Marxist, an Italian Marxist–Leninist and even a Eurocommunist social democrat. First, I reconnect with the universal and critical core of Gramsci's own historical materialism. It is this historical materialism that is central to the project of transnationalising Gramscian Marxism in the twenty-first century. Second, I locate and trace how Gramsci's historical materialism has been brought into international relations and the global political economy. For the greater part of the twentieth century, Gramsci's Marxism has been considered irrelevant to understanding the expansionary tendencies and dynamics of capitalism. However, this has changed as the twentieth-century journey of Gramsci's Marxism inspired the emergence of a neo-Gramscian outgrowth. This transnationalising current of Gramsci's Marxism has challenged the mainstream orthodoxies of twentieth-century Marxism in terms of understanding the international dimension of capitalism.

To a large extent the rise of neo-Gramscian perspectives has engendered a crucial development ensuring Gramsci's Marxism a place in critical analyses of global capitalism and contributing to transformative politics. While this is both a novel and a creative theoretical outpouring, the neo-Gramscian moment is far from complete in terms of transnationalising Gramscian Marxism.

The African continent has been marked by various and remarkably diverse flare-ups of apparent socialist and quasi-socialist intention – from Algeria in the north to Ghana in the west to Ethiopia in the east, with several stops in between. But it is as one approaches the southern cone and moves ever closer to South Africa itself that the intention becomes most marked, not only in rhetoric but also in practice – albeit a practice not as yet concretely realised in any very sustained way. So the question remains: what are we to learn from this southern African regional experience that can provide serviceable lessons for an ongoing struggle to realise equity, social justice and meaningful development in South Africa?

TROPES OF SOCIALIST DEFEAT

After all, one of the stocks-in-trade of African National Congress (ANC)- thinking since South Africa's formal democratisation in 1994 has been to present a negative version of African socialist endeavour elsewhere on the continent and, particularly, within the region. For this version is designed, with varying degrees of caricature, precisely to warn against any feckless dream of a socialist outcome in South Africa itself – however often such an outcome may actually have been invoked by the ANC/South African Communist Party (SACP) itself during the very years of liberation struggle against white dictatorship that it shared with other liberation movements across the region.

Here, one of the favoured tropes – albeit one more often offered in private conversation than in public statement – has been to underscore the lack of realism of the aspiration in general and, in particular, under African conditions and circumstances. This is, of course, a theme sometimes seen in more scholarly offerings. Many decades ago, for example, Roger Murray (1967: 39) queried whether, in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana, the ‘historically necessary’ (some form of socialism) was in fact the ‘historically possible’. More recently, Giovanni Arrighi would suggest that even in the heyday of ‘liberation movement’ enthusiasm (the 1960s and 1970s) and despite his own direct involvement in one of them (in Zimbabwe) he had himself been appropriately sceptical as to the likelihood or even possibility of socialist outcomes in a liberated southern Africa (Arrighi 2009; Saul 2011: chapter 6).