Neoliberalism's Crimes Spur Revolutions: UK Author

Colin Barker, a leading British Marxist intellectual, died in 2019 before the publication of his final work, “Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age,” in 2021.

Photo Insert: Author Colin Barker

This extraordinary volume, published by Haymarket Books, examines the processes and outcomes of mass uprisings between 1989-2019 in Central Europe and Eastern Europe, South Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, Bolivia, Latin America, and Egypt, Truthout reported.

In this excerpt from the chapter titled “Social Movements and the Possibility of Socialist Revolution,” Barker discusses the strategic barriers which movements must overcome in order to “break out beyond the anticipated script” of isolation, compromise, demoralization, and defeat.

The first of these is the isolation of movement activity to particular social sectors or geographical locations. This may be institutionalized and in the practice of classic social democracy, which reserved “political struggle” for the parliamentary party and “economic struggle” for the unions.

In Argentina, the movement of workers in the “recovered factories” was barely connected to workers in “regular employment,” where Peronist unionism acted as a restraint on solidarity. The “Oaxaca commune” of 2006 was — rather like the earlier Paris Commune — restricted to a particular city and region, and thus open to eventual defeat by organized state power.

Second, there remains a problem with a century-long history in countries where parliamentary democracy allows the possibility of the election of “left governments,” what is — and what can be — the relationship between such governments and popular movements? Does the pursuit of parliamentary office ever aid or always hinder the aim of radical emancipation?

The question has assumed some prominence with respect to the “Pink Tide” governments of Latin America, the Syriza government in Greece, and the prospects for new left parties like Podemos in Spain.

While we have witnessed widespread and active resistance to the priorities imposed by neoliberal states, that resistance has been marked by the weakness of alternative projects based on enlarging emancipation and democratic control, Barker said.

It’s not that they have been completely absent, but they have seemed underdeveloped and only partially articulated, in part because of the sectoral isolation previously noted, and in part because old languages of liberation are no longer trusted and new ones still await their crafting.

One key idea, taking partial shape in popular movements across several continents, and now awaiting its next development was that movements’ own self-generated organizations and practices can and should provide the basis for the constitution of society, economy, and politics. It’s not likely we have heard the last of that idea.

Fourth, that idea requires political embodiments in the shape of organizations, networks, and coalitions which take “emancipation from below” as their underlying principle. It’s difficult to foresee the forms that such bodies might take, and how they might emerge to claim some kind of hegemony within movements. Those who already recognize the practical need for them require healthy doses of modesty and openness to diversity of expression if they are to make headway.

Finally, if the Bolsheviks in 1917 were already clear that their own revolution could only succeed if it spread, the further development of global capitalism in the past century has only reinforced that notion.

“Socialism in one country” was always a reactionary as well as a utopian idea. But how might practical internationalism be promoted today? In a decade when the inherently global threat of climate change has become ever more prominent, and when millions of migrants and refugees are forced to flee new apocalypses, a new revolutionary internationalism becomes ever more urgent.

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