Gramsci in Brazil

Adam David Morton’s superb review of the publication of a new book by Carlos Nelson Coutinho, one of the foremost interpreters of Gramsci’s work in Brazil (and, for that matter, in the world), reminded me of a research project I started (but never finished) a few years ago.

The goal of my research was to use Gramsci’s work to make sense of the rise of a whole host of new left-wing governments in Latin America (e.g., in Brazil, Bolivia, and Venezuela) as a a result of the crisis of neoliberalism. And, for that, I decided I needed to make sense of the rise of the neoliberal state and its perceived crisis, which meant going back to an earlier period when capitalist hegemony was first being established in Brazil (as well as Bolivia and Venezuela) prior to neoliberalism.*

My preliminary findings were more or less in accord with what Morton argues: the rise of the developmentalist state in those countries was based on a series of “passive revolutions” (to use one of Gramsci’s key concepts), revolutions without revolution from below, without mass mobilization (with the exception of Bolivian miners, a tiny percentage of the population). These were revolutions in and through the State, and from there decrees (against the opposition of traditional elites) for universal suffrage, agrarian reform, the organization of trade unions and the regulation of formal sector work rules, and so on.

Later, in the 1970s, starting with the Chilean coup of 1973, the “exhaustion” of import-substitution ushered in a period of authoritarian regimes and neoliberal political economy, based on a complex alliance of social forces (from a domestic capitalist class demanding to “open up” for access to foreign markets and foreign capital to State technocrats, often with degrees from U.S. universities, attempting to solve the “fiscal crisis of the state”). If the goal of import-substitution industry was to shift the center of gravity from agriculture to industry, from feudal latifundistas to capital, from rural peasants to agricultural and industrial wage-laborers, and from independent artisans to a middle class employed in both the private and public sectors, neoliberalism was an attempt to shift the center of gravity from the State to the private sector and from traditional manufacturing to services, finance, and lowest-cost exports (to finance increased imports).

My argument was that the rise of neoliberalism did not represent a new set of passive revolutions but, instead, a revolution within the revolution, a “passive transformation” (to use, again, Gramsci’s language), a transformation of the existing hegemony but not a new hegemony. Nor, for that matter, did the crisis of neoliberalism lead to an alternative hegemony. Rather, what we have seen is a “losers’ alliance” or “alliance of the excluded” that has been able to elect nominally anti-neoliberal governments. However, without an alternative hegemony, it’s been impossible to enact a program of economic and social transformation beyond neoliberalism. Instead, they’ve been stuck with ensuring the rules of the neoliberal game, with each group trying to get some piece of the economic and political pie. “I’m going to get mine”—which leads to the expression of corporate interests and corruption and not the universalization of a working-class project.

Thus far, this has been the trajectory of left-wing governments in Latin America. But it is not their ultimate fate, no matter how “large and terrible and complicated” the world actually is.

*So, quickly, the project spiralled out of control and, unfortunately, other pressing projects prevented me from finishing it.

Beyond “Mubarakism without Mubarak”

I have argued that the fate of the revolution in Egypt depends not on the “national-development-oriented coalition of businessmen and military entrepreneurs” but on the much larger group of workers in the cities and peasants in the countryside who were the victims of the economic policies of the Mubarak regime.

Sasha Simic makes a similar argument in a recent essay, arguing that, while for the current military rulers the revolution is over, the “the masses on the streets and in the factories and the fields want what free-market dogma has denied them – bread, work, land and a future worth living.”

In order to understand the dynamic of the Egyptian revolution, it is necessary to make sense of what had been happening in that country long before the Arab Spring.

In the countryside peasants resisted the confiscation of their land. The Egyptian-based Land Centre for Human Rights estimates that between 1998 and 2000, 119 were killed, 846 injured and 1,588 arrested in the struggle over land. Peasants slept in their fields to stop the military taking their plots. Sometimes they won and kept the landlords away. As one victorious peasant woman told the Cairo conference in 2008: ‘We are so poor we have nothing but our dignity and our scrap of land. If they come for it we’ll defend it. If you take our bread, we’ll break your neck.’

In the massive textile factories of the Nile Delta, workers repeatedly went on strike for higher pay and bonuses. In the autumn of 2007, for example, 27,000 workers at the giant Ghazl al-Mahalla textile plant north of Cairo walked out and won 130 days back-pay, improved transport to work, the removal of a corrupt official of the state union and the sack for a hated manager.

It is also necessary to include events beyond the protests in Tahrir Square:

Workers have gone on to organise themselves into 25 independent unions in manufacturing and industry; 28 for clerical workers; 15 in transport; four in education; eight in the health sector; and three in post and telecommunications.

In March 2011 a strike wave by textile workers, bus drivers, tube operatives, postal workers and tourist officials involved 85,000 workers. In September 750,000 workers, including airport staff, doctors and irrigation operatives, went on strike. They included 26,000 sugar refinery workers and 40,000 teachers, whose banners read ‘Meet our demands or no school this year’. It is estimated half-a-million Egyptian workers went on strike between late September and mid- October 2011.

Their demands were not just for higher pay – although low pay is endemic. In 2008 junior doctors unsuccessfully campaigned for 1,000 Egyptian pounds (£100 sterling) a month as a professional minimum. The Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions has demanded a minimum monthly wage of 1,200 Egyptian pounds while the government has only agreed – in principle – to 700. But workers have demanded both economic and political changes. They have called for the end to temporary employment contracts ubiquitous throughout Egyptian workplaces. They have demanded a higher tax rate for the wealthy and, in addition to a minimum wage for workers, a maximum wage for their bosses. Workers and students have also begun the process of expelling the ‘little Mubaraks’ from factories, offices, hospitals and schools. The ‘little Mubaraks’ are both the political overseers from Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, who were commonplace throughout Egyptian society prior to the revolution, or just obnoxious managers who have abused their authority.

It is the resolution of that tension—between, on one hand, the current military rulers and their allies, and, on the other hand, the broad mass of people who are demanding fundamental economic change—that will determine whether or not Egypt is ultimately able to move beyond what Simic calls “Mubarakism without Mubarak.”

Designing the revolution

What’s going on?

First, the Art Institute of Chicago hosts an exhibition of Soviet TASS posters. Now, London’s Royal Academy of Arts is hosting a new show, “Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-35.”

The word “revolution” has become discredited, and this show thoroughly re-energises its meaning in art and architecture. The key fragments of Russian revolutionary creativity still glow like radium, living on in its remaining art and buildings, and hard-wired into the imaginations of some of the 20th and 21st century’s most influential architects.

Could it be that, now that the Cold War is over and in the midst of the Second Great Depression, the revolution that was all but dead and buried is now being rehabilitated?

The Tripoli uprising and the new Libya

Fighting is now taking place in and around the capital of Libya, between Qaddafi’s dwindling forces and both outside Berber and Cyrenaican revolutionaries and residents of Tripoli (beginning with people in the working-class districts).

Juan Cole is optimistic about the outcome:

Those who were expecting a long, hard slog of fighters from the Western Mountain region and from Misrata toward the capital over-estimated dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s popularity in his own capital, and did not reckon with the severe shortages of ammunition and fuel afflicting his demoralized security forces, whether the regular army or mercenaries. Nor did they take into account the steady NATO attrition of his armor and other heavy weapons.

This development, with the capital creating its own nationalist mythos of revolutionary participation, is the very best thing that could have happened. Instead of being liberated (and somewhat subjected) from the outside by Berber or Cyrenaican revolutionaries, Tripoli enters the Second Republic with its own uprising to its name, as a full equal able to gain seats on the Transitional National Council once the Qaddafis and their henchmen are out of the way. There will be no East/West divide. My hopes for a government of national unity as the last phase of the revolution before parliamentary elections now seem more plausible than ever. Tellingly, Tunisia and Egypt both recognized the TNC as Libya’s legitimate government through the night, as the Tripoli uprising unfolded. Regional powers can see the new Libya being born.

He’s back—improbably

However improbable, Gil Scott-Heron has come out with a new album (the second in 16 years), which is truly extraordinary. You can listen to it here (and here).

Scott-Heron is, of course, best known for the rap/poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”

This revolution is not being televised

and it is not being brought to us by Coca-Cola. In fact, as Gar Alperovitz argues in a recent interview [ht: ja], an economic revolution is taking place that is occurring below the radar of the politicians and the mainstream media.

It’s a huge development. But the president doesn’t cover it, and the press, on the surface, is not aware of it.At the grassroots level, there is a lot of activity that is changing the ownership of wealth and making it benefit neighborhoods, workers, cities and communities, at large. There are 11,000 worker-owned companies in the United States, and more people involved in them than are members of unions in the private sector. There are also 120 million Americans who are members of co-operatives — a huge number, about a third of the population.

About 20 percent or 22 percent of our energy is done under public utilities of one kind or another. There are another 4,000 or 5,000 neighborhood corporations, in which neighborhoods own productive wealth to benefit the neighborhood. Much of that is related to housing and land development, but also stores, businesses and factories.

One estimate is that there are 4,500 of these. One, called Newark New Communities, does several million dollars a year in business and pours profits back into helping service the neighborhood — health care and nutrition, education and jobs. So when you really begin to take the lid off of what is emerging in society, there are many forms of decentralized public ownership, social ownership or democratized wealth.

You don’t hear about these developments on TV or radio on in newspapers. Mainstream economists don’t study or refer to these examples of noncapitalism. What they mean is there’s no such thing as “the enterprise” or “the market.” There are, instead, many different kinds of enterprises and markets, a growing number of them noncapitalist.

Here’s my own list of economic alternatives, compiled at the request of students who were working with unemployed workers in a homeless shelter.