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All the most interesting radical movements of the past four decades have sprung up from outside Marxism. Feminism, environmentalism, gay and ethnic politics, animal rights, antiglobalisation, the peace movement: these have now taken over from an antiquated commitment to class struggle, and represent new forms of political activism which have left Marxism well behind. Its contributions to them have been marginal and uninspiring. There is indeed still a political left, but it is one appropriate to a postclass, postindustrial world.
O ne of the most flourishing of the new political currents is known as the anticapitalist movement, so it is hard to see how there has been a decisive break with Marxism. However critical of Marxist ideas this movement might be, the shift from Marxism to anticapitalism is hardly a huge one. In fact, Marxism's dealings with other radical trends have been largely to its credit. Take, for example, its relations with the women's movement. These, to be sure, have proved fraught enough from time to time. Some male Marxists have contemptuously brushed aside the whole question of sexuality, or sought to appropriate feminist politics for their own ends. There is plenty in the Marxist tradition that is at best complacently gender-blind and at worst odiously patriarchal. Yet this is far from being the whole story, as some separatist feminists in the 1970s and '80s liked self-servingly to suppose. Many male Marxists have learned enduringly from feminism, both personally and politically. And Marxism in turn has made a major contribution to feminist thought and practice.
Some decades ago, when the Marxist-feminist dialogue was at its most energetic, a whole set of vital questions were raised.1 What was the Marxist view of domestic labour, which Marx himself had largely ignored? Did women form a social class in the Marxist sense? How was a theory largely concerned with industrial production to make sense of child care, consumption, sexuality, the family? Was the family central to capitalist society, or would capitalism herd people into communal barracks if it found it more profitable and could get away with it? (There is an assault on the middle-class family in the Communist Manifesto, a case which the philandering Friedrich Engels, eager to achieve a dialectical unity of theory and practice, zealously adopted in his private life.) Could there be freedom for women without the overthrow of class-society? What were the relations between capitalism and patriarchy, given that the latter is a great deal more ancient than the former? Some Marxist-feminists held that women's oppression could end only with the fall of capitalism. Others, perhaps more plausibly, claimed that capitalism could dispense with this mode of oppression and still survive. On this view, there is nothing in the nature of capitalism which requires the subjection of women. But the two histories, that of patriarchy and class-society, are so tightly interwoven in practice that it would be hard to imagine the overthrow of the one without great shock waves rolling through the other.
Much of Marx's own work is gender-blind—though this can sometimes be explained by the fact that capitalism is too, at least in certain respects. We have already noted the system's relative indifference to gender, ethnicity, social pedigree and so on when it comes to who it can exploit or to whom it can peddle its wares. If Marx's worker is eternally male, however, it is because Marx himself was an old-fashioned Victorian patriarch, not just because of the nature of capitalism. Even so, he sees sexually reproductive relations as of the first importance, and in The German Ideology even claims that to begin with the family is the only social relation. When it comes to the production of life itself—''both of one's own in labour and of fresh life in procreation''—the two grand historical narratives of sexual and material production, without either of which human history would grind rapidly to a halt, are seen by Marx as closely interwoven. What men and women create most notably are other men and women. In doing so, they generate the labour power that any social system needs to sustain itself. Both sexual and material reproduction have their own distinct histories, which are not to be merged into one; but both are sites of age-old strife and injustice, and their respective victims thus have a joint interest in political emancipation.
Engels, who practiced sexual as well as political solidarity with the proletariat by taking a working-class lover, thought the emancipation of women inseparable from the ending of class-society. (Since his lover was also Irish, he considerately added an anticolonial dimension to their relationship.) His work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is an impressive piece of social anthropology, full of flaws but rife with good intentions, which while never challenging the conventional division of sexual labour, regards the oppression of women by men as ''the first class subjection.'' The Bolsheviks took the so-called woman question equally seriously: the uprising that was to topple the Tsar was launched with mass demonstrations on International Women's Day in 1917. Once in power, the party gave equality for women a high political priority and set up an International Women's Secretariat. That Secretariat in turn summoned the First International Working Women's Congress, attended by delegates from twenty countries, whose appeal ''To the Working Women of the World'' viewed the goals of communism and the liberation of women as closely allied.
''Up until the resurgence of the women's movements in the 1960s,'' writes Robert J. C. Young, ''it is striking how it was only men from the socialist or communist camps who regarded the issue of women's equality as intrinsic to other forms of political liberation.''2 In the early twentieth century, the communist movement was the only place where the issue of gender, along with questions of nationalism and colonialism, was systematically raised and debated. ''Communism,'' Young continues, ''was the first, and only, political programme to recognize the interrelation of these different forms of domination and exploitation [class, gender and colonialism] and the necessity of abolishing all of them as the fundamental basis for the successful realization of the liberation of each."3 Most so-called socialist societies have pressed for substantial progress in women's rights, and many of them took the ''woman question'' with commendable seriousness long before the West got round to addressing it with any ardour. When it comes to issues of gender and sexuality, the actual record of communism has been seriously flawed; but it remains the case, as Michèle Barrett has argued, that ''outside feminist thought there is no tradition of critical analysis of women's oppression that could match the incisive attention given to the question by one Marxist thinker after another.''4
If Marxism has been a steadfast champion of women's rights, it has also been the most zealous advocate of the world's anti-colonialist movements. It fact, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, it was the primary inspiration behind them. Marxists were thus in the van of the three greatest political struggles of the modern age: resistance to colonialism, the emancipation of women and the fight against fascism. For most of the great first-generation theorists of the anticolonial wars, Marxism provided the indispensable starting point. In the 1920s and '30s, practically the only men and women to be found preaching racial equality were communists. Most African nationalism after the Second World War, from Nkrumah and Fanon onwards, relied on some version of Marxism or socialism. Most communist parties in Asia incorporated nationalism into their agendas. As Jules Townshend writes:
While the working classes, with the notable exceptions of the French and Italian, seemed to be relatively dormant in the advanced capitalist countries [in the 1960s], the peasantry, along with the intelligentsias, of Asia, Africa and Latin America were making revolutions, or creating societies, in the name of socialism. From Asia came the inspiration of Mao's Cultural Revolution in 1966 in China and Ho Chi Minh's Vietcong resistance to the Americans in Vietnam; from Africa the socialist and emancipatory visions of Nyerere of Tanzania, Nkrumah of Ghana, Cabral of Guinea-Bissau and Franz Fanon of Algeria; and from Latin America the Cuban Revolution of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.5
From Malaysia to the Caribbean, Ireland to Algeria, revolutionary nationalism forced Marxism to rethink itself. At the same time, Marxism sought to offer Third World liberation movements somethi
ng rather more constructive than replacing rule by a foreign-based capitalist class with rule by a native one. It also looked beyond the fetish of the nation to a more internationalist vision. If Marxism lent its support to national liberation movements in the so-called Third World, it did so while insisting that their perspectives should be international-socialist rather than bourgeoisnationalist. For the most part, this insistence fell on deaf ears.
On coming to power, the Bolsheviks proclaimed the right of self-determination for colonial peoples. The world communist movement was to do an immense amount to translate this sentiment into practice. Lenin, despite his critical attitude to nationalism, had been the first major political theorist to grasp the significance of national liberation movements. He also insisted in the teeth of Romantic nationalism that national liberation was a question of radical democracy, not chauvinist sentiment. In a uniquely powerful combination, Marxism thus became both an advocate of anticolonial-ism and a critique of nationalist ideology. As Kevin Anderson comments, ''Over three decades before India won its independence and more than four decades before the African liberation movements came to the fore in the early 1960s, [Lenin] was already theorizing anti-imperialist national movements as a major factor in global politics.''6 ''All Communist Parties,'' Lenin wrote in 1920, ''should render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among the dependent and underprivileged nations (for example Ireland, the American Negroes, etc.) and in the colonies.''7 He attacked what he called ''Great Russian chauvinism'' within the Soviet Communist Party, a stance that did not prevent him from effectively endorsing the annexation of the Ukraine and later the forcible absorption of Georgia. Some other Bolsheviks, including Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, displayed a strong hostility to nationalism.
Marx himself was somewhat more ambiguous about anticolonialist politics. In his early career, he tended to support the struggle against colonial power only if it seemed likely to promote the goal of socialist revolution. Certain nationalities, he scandalously declared, were ''non-historic'' and doomed to extinction. In a single Eurocentric gesture, Czechs, Slovenes, Dalmatians, Romanians, Croats, Serbs, Moravians, Ukrainians and others were cavalierly consigned to the ash can of history. At one point, Engels zealously supported the colonization of Algeria and the U.S. conquest of Mexico, while Marx himself had scant respect for the great Latin American liberator, Simon Bolivar. India, he remarks, could boast no history of its own, and its subjugation by the
British had unwittingly laid down the conditions for socialist revolution in the subcontinent. It is not the kind of talk that would land you an A in postcolonialism courses from Canterbury to California.
If Marx can speak positively about colonialism, it is not because he relishes the prospect of one nation trampling upon another. It is because he sees such oppression, vile and degrading as he judged it, as bound up with the arrival of capitalist modernity in the ''undeveloped'' world. This in turn he saw not only as bestowing certain benefits on that world, but also as preparing the way for socialism. We have already discussed the pros and cons of such "teleological" thought.
The suggestion that colonialism can have its progressive aspects tends to stick in the craw of most Western postcolonial writers, fearful as they are that to confess anything so politically incorrect might be to sell the pass to racism and ethno-centrism. It is, however, something of a commonplace among, say, Indian and Irish historians.8 How could such a formidably complex phenomenon as colonialism, stretching as it does over a range of regions and centuries, have produced not a single positive effect? In nineteenth-century Ireland, British rule brought famine, violence, destitution, racial supremacy and religious oppression. It also brought in its wake much of the literacy, language, education, limited democracy, technology, communications and civic institutions which allowed the nationalist movement to organise and eventually seize power. These were valuable goods in themselves, as well as promoting a worthy political cause.
While a good many of the Irish were keen to enter upon the modern age by learning English, some upper-class Irish Romantics were patronizingly eager for them to speak nothing but their native tongue. We find a similar prejudice in some postcolonial writers today, for whom capitalist modernity would appear an unqualified disaster. It is not an opinion shared by many of the postcolonial peoples whose cause they champion. Of course it would have been preferable for the Irish to have entered upon democracy (and eventually prosperity) in some less traumatic way. The Irish should never have been reduced to the indignity of colonial subjects in the first place. Given that they were, however, it proved possible to pluck something of value from this condition.
Marx, then, may have detected some ''progressive'' trends in colonialism. But this did not stop him from denouncing the ''barbarity'' of colonial rule in India and elsewhere, or of cheering on the great Indian Rebellion of 1857. The alleged atrocities of the 1857 insurgents, he commented, were merely a reflex of Britain's own predatory conduct in the country. British imperialism in India, far from constituting a benignly civilising process, was ''a bleeding process with a vengeance.''9 India laid bare the ''profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation,'' which assumed respectable guise at home but went naked abroad.10 Indeed, Aijaz Ahmad claims that no influential nineteenth-century Indian reformer took as clear-cut a position as Marx did on the question of Indian national independence.11
Marx also recanted his earlier view of the conquest of Mexico, as Engels did of the French expropriation of Algeria. It had, the latter reflected bitterly, unleashed nothing but bloodshed, rapine, violence and the ''barefaced arrogance'' of the settlers on the ''lesser breed'' of natives. Only a revolutionary movement, Engels urged, would retrieve the situation. Marx championed the Chinese national liberation movement of his day against what he contemptuously called the colonialist ''civilisation-mongers.'' He was, in other words, to make amends for his earlier chauvinism, rallying behind the liberation struggles of colonized nations whether they were ''non-historic'' or not. Assured that any nation that oppresses another forges its own chains, he viewed Irish independence as a precondition for socialist revolution in England. The conflict of the working class with their masters, he writes in the Communist Manifesto, at first takes the form of a national struggle.
For the tradition I have just traced, issues of culture, gender, language, otherness, difference, identity and ethnicity were inseparable from questions of state power, material inequality, the exploitation of labour, imperial plunder, mass political resistance and revolutionary transformation. If you were to subtract the latter from the former, however, you would have something like much of today's postcolonial theory. There is a simpleminded notion abroad that somewhere around 1980, a discredited Marxism gave way to a more politically relevant postcolonialism. This, in fact, involves what the philosophers call a category mistake, rather like trying to compare a dormouse with the concept of matrimony. Marxism is a mass political movement stretching across continents and centuries, a creed for which countless men and women have fought and sometimes died. Postcolonialism is an academic language largely unspoken outside a few hundred universities, and one sometimes as unintelligible to the average Westerner as Swahili.
As a theory, postcolonialism sprang into existence in the late twentieth century, around the time when the struggles for national liberation had more or less run their course. The founding work of the current, Edward Said's Orientalism, appeared in the mid-1970s, just as a severe crisis of capitalism was rolling back the revolutionary spirit in the West. It is perhaps significant in this respect that Said's book is quite strongly anti-Marxist. Postcolonialism, while preserving that revolutionary legacy in one sense, represents a displacement of it in another. It is a postrevolutionary discourse suitable to a postrevolutionary world. At its finest, it has produced work of rare insight and originality. At its least creditable, it represents little more than the foreign affairs department of postmodernism.
So it is not as though class must now
give way to gender, identity and ethnicity. The conflict between the transnational corporations and the poorly paid, ethnic, often female labourers of the south of the globe is a question of class, in the precise Marxist sense of the term. It is not that a ''Eurocentric'' focus on, say, Western coal miners or mill workers has been now superseded by less provincial perspectives. Class was always an international phenomenon. Marx liked to think that it was the working class that acknowledged no homeland, but in reality it is capitalism. In one sense of the term, globalisation is stale news, as a glance at the Communist Manifesto would suggest. Women have always formed a large part of the labour force, and racial oppression was always hard to disentangle from economic exploitation. The so-called new social movements are for the most part not new at all. And the notion that they have ''taken over'' from a class-obsessed, antipluralist Marxism overlooks the fact that they and Marxism have worked in fruitful alliance for some considerable time.
Postmodernists have sometimes accused Marxism of being Eurocentric, seeking to impose its own white, rationalist Western values on very different sectors of the planet. Marx was certainly a European, as we can tell from his burning interest in political emancipation. Emancipatory traditions of thought mark the history of Europe, just as the practice of slavery does. Europe is the home of both democracy and the death camps. If it includes genocide in the Congo, it also encompasses the Paris Communards and the Suffragettes. It signifies both socialism and fascism, Sophocles and Arnold Schwarzenegger, civil rights and Cruise missiles, a legacy of feminism and a heritage of famine. Other parts of the globe are equally marked by a mixture of enlightened and oppressive practices. Only those who in their simpleminded way see Europe as wholly negative and the postcolonial ''margins'' as purely positive could overlook this fact. Some of them even call themselves pluralists. Most of these people are guilt-stricken Europeans rather than postcolonials with an animus against Europe. Their guilt rarely extends to the racism implicit in their contempt for Europe as such.
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