Marxisms in the 21st Century: critique, crisis and struggles eds. by Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar (review)

This fascinating and timely book oscillates interestingly between two sets of tensions that the authors –and particularly the editors in the introduction and the conclusion – address in convincing terms. The first tension rises in thinking how do we reconcile a plurality of Marxisms while embracing Marxism as a coherent set of guiding principles, without becoming post-Marxists. The second tension concerns what kind of guiding principles Marxism provides: analytical or political?

The varied approaches therefore that Williams suggests in the introduction (12) entail a plurality of meanings to the term Marxism as well as a plural reading of Marxist politics in the light of political developments of the 21^st century. The book, if taken as a whole, seems to suggest that it is futile to address this distance of analysis and politics. Most authors thence depart from a situated analytical perspective. We therefore have chapters where there is analysis and critique of Marxism as politics (ANC’s ‘Marxism’ for instance), chapters where there is a critical reading of Marxist analysis (and politics) alongside other traditions (Foucault, feminism, ecology), and chapters where Marxist politics are assessed in the context of new social realities (South Africa’s urban social movements). The contemporary period is then seen as a prism to analyse in sobriety either current affairs in Southern Africa or (mainly unfortunate) events in the African 20^th century.

For these reasons, this book’s title is indicative of its contributors’ and editors’ intentions: the stress is first on the plural tense of the noun (Marxisms) and then on the timing: 21^st century. However, adapting a plural take that is open-ended comes with responsibility: we should differentiate between ideology and analytical systems.

On this note, it would be helpful to decipher what this collection is not. The collection in then not contributing to the ongoing debate involving scholars like Zizek, Badiou, Balibar and others, on new-found Marxism. It is therefore not a philosophical book, as the theoretical contributions are few (Veriava’s chapter stands out in this respect). It is not a strictly politicised book either, and partakes only to a small extent in the Latin American-centred debate for and on ‘socialism for the 21^st century’ (although one chapter ends with an Evo Morales quote (162)).

The collection is not in a political theory, as much as in a critical policy direction and in its most theoretically driven chapters it decidedly becomes part of what Burawoy (2003; and this volume) calls a sociological Marxism (46). This Marxism, that takes advantage of Gramsci (as per Satgar’s chapter) and Polanyi (as per Burawoy’s chapter) is positioned in civil society. This focus illuminates the book’s relevance, and comes at a crucial time and place in the three ways that the subtitle explains: a time and place of crisis, critique and struggle in civil societies of Africa, and in the global capitalist context. These three themes, organising the material, permeate all three chapters: One. Democratising and Globalising Marxism, Two. Marxism and Left Politics; and Three. Crises of Marxism in Africa and possibilities for the future. An attention to critique is given in Chapters One and Two, while Chapter Three delineates a Marxism for South Africa and from an ‘African’ perspective, as it deploys Marxisms in a framework of the South addressing social and historical patterns of the South.

Satgar, taking Gramsci to this Southern trajectory, interestingly notes how the concept of ‘passive revolution’ could help us understand post-apartheid SA (66-67). He urges us to see the historicist Gramsci outside his strictly Italian references, by tracing the argument, for instance, to Cosatu’s policies. His point that ‘all history is world history’ brings Gramsci in dialogue with Wallerstein; it would be interesting to trace this further in a discussion of how notions such as the ‘subaltern’ influenced post-colonial studies, or how this interacts with Eric Wolf’s work on...