Marxism and the Politics of Possibility—Excerpts

John Krinsky, The City College of New York

How are contemporary struggles of people from Egypt to Wisconsin, and from Greece to

India connected?

Given the connection among struggles, how can people best conduct local action while

building solidarity with others in ways that advance a larger project of freedom?

How do activists and others make sense of these struggles, why do they do so as they do

and what can be done to promote alternatives to dominant ways of understanding

contemporary social relations?

How do the legacies of previous struggles prepare us—or impede us—from these tasks?

These are not precisely the questions that scholars of social movements have been asking for the

last thirty years or so, but they do bear some family resemblance to their more scholarly cousins.

The academic versions most often lead to answers that aspire to a generality that the more

activist-analytic ones do not. Academic social movement scholarship asks questions that then

get sorted into ‘theories,’ or ‘approaches’ whose tenets are supposed to apply across cases and

generate testable hypotheses in a predictable way.

This chapter will begin by reviewing these theories briefly according to what kinds of

questions they ask and answers they offer. I will argue that each does have something to offer an

activist understanding of social movements, but that each also is one-sided. They all suggest

facets of movement dynamics, but do so as if they were unconnected to each other, or imply that

their collisions are contingent rather than systematic. I then offer a different, Marxist approach,

drawn largely from the work of Antonio Gramsci, and highlighting five key aspects of Marxism,

namely: dialectical totality, contradiction, immanence, coherence, and praxis. What I mean by

these will become apparent, but for now, it will suffice to say that these aspects shift the analytic

and political ground of academic theories toward the initial set of questions, making them both

more useful for activism and more comprehensive.

Totality

Marxism begins by seeing the world as a dialectical totality. Marxists, that is, understand the

social world as in a state of constant change and thus as composing and composed by the many

relationships among people, the natural world, and the products of human labour. These are not

just ‘parts’ that can be summed; rather, they are elements always defined by their internal

relations to the whole.1 Nevertheless, this totality cannot be comprehended all at once; rather, it

must be understood by a process of careful abstraction, by identifying key relationships, and

understanding the relation of parts to wholes. If we consider, for example, the uprising in Egypt

in early 2011, we could understand it as part of a yearning for democracy in the Arab world, as it

and other revolutions throughout the Middle East suggest. This would be one-sided. As Adam

Hanieh argues,2 there is no clear separation between the ‘political’ and ‘economic’ aspects of the

revolts, and the Mubarak regime’s embrace of neoliberalism, prompted by loan agreements with

international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, resulted in declining

living standards for most Egyptians amid economic growth and massive concentration of wealth. 1 Ollman 2003.

2 Hanieh 2011.

This is not to say that the uprisings in Egypt were economically determined in the sense of being

predestined. The question is rather how we understand the relationship among neoliberal

policies, mass impoverishment, and the way in which the regime lost even the veneer of popular

legitimacy over the course of a decade of protest, and why the protest coalesced as it did when it

did.

Contradiction is a central principle of dialectics, and one of its distinguishing features as an

approach to knowledge: in a dialectical approach, something can be X and not X. How? Because

dialectics is fundamentally about studying change and relationships, and the ‘thingness’ of

anything is an abstraction from a spatial and temporal set of changing relationships, and so

already contains within it a state beyond itself. This is centrally related to totality, since

contradictions become evident at different levels of analysis and abstraction.

Let’s take an example in the study of social movements: Social movements often have

more ‘reformist’ and more ‘radical’ wings, networks of activists that are joined together, but who

often disagree, not just about tactics, but also about goals, about the extent of the relevant group

being politically represented, and about who best represents this group. Reformist activists often

take dominant categories of social groups for granted and seek political equality, social

inclusion, or economic benefits for that group, while more radical activists seek to change the

entire outlines of the social institutions and categories on which existing exclusions are based.

Gamson notes this tension in his work on gay activism’s encounter with queer activism in the

early 1990s, arguing that this is a fundamental contradiction in identity movements.3 The

contradiction goes further, however, and affects political representation in movements as such,

because movements always at least raise the question of how to represent a subordinate group in

3 Gamson 1995.

order to abolish the conditions of their subordination (and thus, a key element in their

‘groupness’). This is as fundamental to queer movements and antiracism as it is to revolutionary

socialism. Movements therefore operate on the seams of social contradictions between what is

and what could be, but as such develop their own internal contradictions between reformist and

radical tendencies. Reformers will experience contradictions between their strategies and the

intransigence of oppression; radicals will experience contradictions as they face internal

struggles over whether it is necessary to ‘prefigure’ new social arrangements, or whether one can

‘dismantle the Master’s house with the Master’s tools,’ in poet Audre Lorde’s terms.4

Nevertheless, radicals’ commitment to the self-activation of subordinated groups—rather than

their being represented by elites, either from outside or from within the group—tends to throw

the conditions of subordination to the forefront, as reformist measures tend to reinforce larger

systems of subordination even while benefiting some members of previously subordinated

groups.

Similarly, Marxists are perfectly capable of understanding the state as a multi-sited

institutional amalgam of often-conflicting groups, in which institutional rules form that may be at

odds with each other, and thus form, in Armstrong and Bernstein’s terms, ‘contradictions’.5 The

difference is that at a higher level of analysis, Marxists also identify contradictions at the heart of

the state, taken in aggregate, according to its governing function. For states—whatever their

forms—depend on the taxation of economic surplus in order to fund their operations. Because of

this, they require some level of legitimacy among the population that generates this surplus. This

requires some combination of force and consent, and consent is usually at least partly ‘bought’

by state provision for people’s material needs and wellbeing. At the same time, however, to the

4 Lorde 1984.

5 Armstrong and Bernstein 2008, p. 86.

extent that the state provides for popular needs, it needs to tax accumulated wealth, and since this

is concentrated among owners of capital who can often invest their capital elsewhere, states can

be caught in the contradiction between accumulation and legitimization.6 States develop various

solutions for dealing with this contradiction, both through internal institutional design—e.g.,

privatization of public services, recognition of corporate rights, promotion of civic service and

volunteering, etc.—and external relations with transnational financial institutions such as the

World Bank and International Monetary Fund. These solutions set important parameters around

the institutional contradictions that occur at the ‘meso’-level of analysis favored by institutional

analysts like Armstrong and Bernstein.

Immanence

Marx describes his method as ‘regard[ing] every historically developed form as being in

a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well.’7 The principle of

contradiction—whether at the level of a movement, disaggregated social institutions or states—is

critical to understanding this. If, as Marx writes, ‘men make their own history, but not in

circumstances they choose freely’,8 the constant is that people are socially engaged in work upon

their social and material worlds, and thus have to deal with contradictions at every level and in

every aspect of social life. Nevertheless, as pragmatists also would point out, in doing so, they

unite past-, present-, and future-oriented action in ways that either reinforces their inability to

overcome particular contradictions or indicate at least the potential to do so.

6 e.g., O’Connor 1973.

7 Marx 1976 [1873], p.103.

8 Marx 1963 [1852], p. 1.

‘Immanence’ is another way of speaking about this potential to change the world.

Derived from religious language denoting a god that is manifest in everything, immanence here

suggests that change itself is an aspect of everything, though not everything is constantly

changing, not least in anything like the same ways or at the same speed. The potential for human

action to effect significant changes on its environments and its protagonists, however, is revealed

even where it fails to overcome the contradictions to which it is directed. The task of political

analysis is to identify important parts of the totality of human relations, the contradictions to

which they are subject, and the potentials for change that are revealed when these contradictions

erupt. For example, we find in instances of mass upheaval, such as the demonstrations in early

2011 in Tahrir Square, potentials for self-organization—e.g., in the provision of health care,

sanitation, meals—that are critical for developing alternatives to a reliance on state provision,

even though the demonstrations gave way to a considerable increase in the power of military

officials who also control significant portions of Egypt’s wealth. They also revealed new ways

in which communications technologies and on-the-ground organizing can be combined to keep

officials on their back foot during the initial stages of a mobilization. And for those paying

attention to the development of protest in Egypt over the previous decade, earlier protests among

judges and workers revealed the potential for a powerful antigovernment coalition to form

between professionals, labourers, and the unemployed. And one can also discover activists

fighting against an authoritarian regime in the Middle East making connections to struggles

against a democratically elected governor in the US Midwest.

Three things follow from the centrality to Marxist dialectics of the identification of potentials for

change. First is the danger of falling into mere speculation. One cannot predict a revolution

based on a small demonstration of very committed activists. There may be a political temptation

to do so, on occasion, but what Gramsci called a ‘realist’ or ‘historicist’ conception of

immanence must identify potentials to be developed rather than predict certainties.9 To be sure,

Marxist writing sometimes does the latter, as in the stirring prose of the Communist Manifesto.

This leads to the second point about realist immanence, namely, that it is inextricably tied to

practice and to larger elements of Marxist theory. The Communist Manifesto’s strength lies in its

forceful, rhetorical positing of the immanent potential of the working class to change the totality

of human relations to a more emancipatory and democratic future. At times, this seems like a

certainty, at others, a more contingent outcome of struggle. To the extent that it appears as a

certainty, it must be understood as hortatory rhetoric, located in the particular time and place of

its production, and as an intervention in it.

More generally, Gramsci argues:

Anybody who makes a prediction has in fact a ‘programme’ for whose victory he

is working, and his prediction is precisely an element contributing to that victory.

This does not mean that prediction need always be arbitrary and gratuitous, or

simply tendentious. Indeed one might say that only to the extent to which the

objective aspect of prediction is linked to a programme does it acquire its

objectivity.10

9 Gramsci 1971, p. 399.

10 Gramsci 1971, p. 171.

Third, because discovering and developing potentials for action is central to Marxism,

learning and consciousness are at the heart of Marxist dialectics.11 Marxism is concerned

especially in identifying those movements and moments of collective action that develop

people’s consciousness of our broader interconnections, and allow people not just to ‘internalise’

new ideas, repertoires of action and organization, and new political vocabularies, but also to

‘externalise’ their actions to transform the world around them in increasingly significant ways.

Coherence

The work of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci offers perhaps the clearest distinction

between realist and speculative immanence, and form of analysis that places the analyst within

rather than above social relations. Gramsci’s role as a leader in the Italian Communist Party in

the 1920s (he spent the late 1920s and 1930s in jail, nearly until his death in 1937) also put him

at the center of life-and-death strategic discussions about the direction of the Party and of the

world socialist movement. Gramsci viewed strategy through the lens of coherence, or the ways

in which, amid an ever-changing world, stability is created in ways that produce inequalities of

power. His analyses all focus on the ways in which organizational, linguistic, ideological,

economic and coercive relations can be woven together so that a particular configuration of them

seems natural and stable. His studies of different sorts of intellectuals (organic and traditional)

and their role in producing knowledge; of language policy and political participation; of socialist

strategy; of Italian fascism; and of new relations of production in the United States are all geared

toward understanding their connections to political-intellectual-ethical projects that cohere and

‘make sense.’ Gramsci indicates something other than logical coherence; he is interested in

coherence not as a formal property but as historical and political connections that have only to be

11 This is a feature of dialectical thinking in general. See, e.g., Dewey 1938 for a Pragmatist understanding of education that is close to Marxism’s view.

more stable than competing attempts to form alternatives. Accordingly, coherence implies its

own contradiction: if coherence implies domination and an ‘integration of practical and

theoretical elements that increase not only logical consistency, but also the capacity to act,’ those

subject to dominance find that their practices are characterised by incoherence’.12 The

disorganization of subordinate groups is often experienced as powerlessness. Because for

Gramsci, coherence implies the ability to articulate sustained sets of actions, organizations, and

languages, the obstacles facing subordinated groups are formidable. Even when these groups are

able to participate politically, they often do in ways that may advance some aspect of their

interests but reinforce the larger, systematic relationships that result in their powerlessness in the

first place.

Socio-historical coherence enters social movement theory as ‘repertoires of action’ and

related concepts for organization and discourse.13 Embedded in the material routines of daily

life, repertoires are relatively stable ways in which actors interact with others (e.g., protesters and

police, radicals and moderates, etc.) that form the basis for improvisation. Tilly notes, for

example, that in a pre-modern ‘repertoire of contention,’ characterised by actions like grain

seizures than by mass marches, there had to be regularly scheduled markets near which grain

silos were built, and there had to be an agricultural system that generated surplus while also

generating hunger. Repertoires cohere not because of any intrinsic or logical necessity, but

because the performances that compose them accrete over time growing out of historically

available resources. They are not static, however. Tilly describes repertoires as interactive in

that they describe ways of interacting among allies, opponents, and other audience-actor

configurations, and as such, they are subject to their own contingency.

12 Thomas 2009, p. 370.

13 e.g., Tilly 1995; see also Clemens 1997; Steinberg 1994, 1999.

Repertoires are marked not just by everyday routines, but by the political projects that compose

them. They are not neutral. The more nationally focused ‘social movement’ repertoire of the 19th

and 20th centuries, for example, featured indirect protest and demands instead of direct action

seeking immediate satisfaction. This was in recognition, however, of the concentration of power

in national governments, itself a project of elites’ accumulation strategies.14 Similarly, the fact

that City Hall protesters in February 2011 acceded to being penned in by metal police barricades

speaks to a repertoire shift in which protester-police relations have become ever more controlled.

Praxis

Ultimately, of course, Marxism is geared toward praxis, toward a theoretically infused

acting upon the world. In fact, Marxism does not even make sense without praxis. Remember

Gramsci’s point about people making a prediction having a project they are trying to accomplish:

not only are people always engaged politically when they intervene in social processes, but the

truth value of any prediction lies in its accomplishment. It has the potential to be true only to the

extent that people are working or have shown themselves to be capable of working toward this

accomplishment.

There are several important consequences for incorporating praxis into a theory. First,

orienting theory to practice means trying to understand what practice or agency is and how it

works. Recall that practice itself is one aspect of a totality, and as such, contains within it past

and present and the potentials of the future and unfolds at multiple levels of analysis in

sometimes contradictory ways. Drawing on the Pragmatist tradition, Emirbayer and Mische

capture at least some of this view in their conception of agency as being a ‘chordal triad’

combining past-, present-, and future-oriented interactions among social actors.15 As in a chord, 14 Tilly 1995.

15 Emirbayer and Mische 1998.

the notes of memory, tradition, and habit; problem-solving; and long-term projects are always

struck together, but receive different emphasis or prominence. It is clear that when actual praxis

is robbed of significant projective elements—i.e., future-orientation— the real potentials of their

agency to realise transformative social change is deeply compromised. It is partly for this reason

that when Marx speaks about the ‘silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the

domination of the capitalist over the worker’,16 it is to indicate that the present-oriented concern

with existence keeps workers within the confines of their ‘education, tradition, and habit,’ and

very nearly completely shuts down projective elements of praxis.

A second consequence of incorporating praxis into a theory of movements is a real shift

in the kinds of questions that you ask. Recall that academic social movement theories typically

ask variants of the following sets of questions:

Why do movements arise when they do?

What is the relationship of movements to more ‘formal’ political formations?

How do movement activists spur others into action?

Why do movement organizations organise as they do?

These are, without doubt, important questions. Moreover, movement scholars have imparted to

them a great deal of nuance, even to the extent that they regularly call into question whether

social movements are ‘things’ worth studying, distinct from other political formations, and

whether their analysis crowds out analysis of these other formations.17 Even from the beginnings

of contemporary movement theories in the late 1960s, scholars have searched for metaphors,

16 Marx 1976 [1867], p. 899.

17 e.g., Burstein 1998; Walder 2009.

such as social movement organizations in social movement industries or social movement

communities in order to try to distinguish different levels of analysis. Others attempt to delimit

the meaning of ‘social movement’ to a historically specific form of ‘contentious politics,’ a more

inclusive category encompassing strikes, revolutions, shaming rituals, and other public forms of

grievance expression.

However many insights answers to these questions have generated, they have tended to

do so by throwing together, rather than reconciling theoretically disparate approaches. Thus, for

the purposes of explaining the macro-dynamics of the appearance of protest, analysts can use

theories that focus on anonymous forces of economic or political history while to explain how

activists spur others into action, they can use theories that privilege the interpretive frameworks

or emotional states of mind of the mobilised. The theories do not have to have anything to do

with each other.

The task of Marxist theory is to generate insights across levels of analysis and lead us to

ask directly about the relations among the questions posed by existing movement theories. To

break the boundaries separating the subdisciplinary inquiries in the social movements field

implies a shift toward praxis, and the questions that flow from it. Recall that these questions are

at the same time pitched at higher and lower levels of generality: If we are to ask questions like

‘What kind of organization is required to make a coherent challenge to neoliberal capitalist

policies?’ we cannot answer them without reference to actual contemporary or historical

examples that demonstrate at least some group’s capability to make such a challenge, to

formulate alternative politics, generate strategies that block neoliberal dominance, etc. What this

means is that it is difficult to have a Marxist theory of social movements generalizable outside

actual instances of movement. Praxis generates specific kinds of questions that the standpoint of

totality reminds us are not ‘cases,’ but facets of an interrelated whole. As a facet of Marxist

analysis, then, praxis is inseparable from totality, contradiction, immanence, and coherence. In

spite of the apparent ‘grand theory’ of Marxism, praxis has a way of disciplining and making

theory more reflexive and modest even than the apparently less-ambitious ‘middle-range’

theories popular among academic theorists.

Marxist analysis is tethered to praxis and its development. This makes it centrally

concerned with learning and consciousness. Here, too, connections with Pragmatism are

significant, as suggested earlier. A more specifically Marxist-inspired view of learning grew up

around Lev Vygotsky, a psychologist in the Soviet Union active in the 1920s and early 1930s

and was taken in several directions by his students after his death. The important part about

Vygotsky’s heritage for the current discussion is that even at the level of learning, it shows that

‘mind’ is a social relation rather than an individual property stored in the head.18 While this has

since become a well-understood idea in several branches of psychology, pedagogy, artificial

intelligence, and studies of human-computer interaction, the ‘cultural historical’ school of

psychology focuses on the ways in which people learn through acting in concrete, historically

determinate situations in attempts to craft coherence amid social contradictions.19 Learning—the

development of consciousness—therefore, depends on actively changing the world around you,

and can equally be stymied by the intractability of certain contradictions. In contrast to

Pragmatists, however, the cultural historical approach to learning has a more comprehensive

approach to the weight of the world we have already created than does Pragmatism. If, like

Pragmatism, the cultural-historical approach focuses on the ways that people solve problems

together and in so doing develop a larger concept of their world, the difference is that, as

18 Vygotsky 1978.

19 Krinsky and Barker 2009; Collins, this volume.

Gramsci indicates, this process of generalization can be blocked by the inequalities in the civil

society institutions that the Pragmatists celebrate.20 Put differently, the Pragmatists’ wish for

democratic self-discovery fails to recognise that the institutions in which they hope this might

take place are themselves subject to more general contradictory tendencies, not least of which is

capitalist exploitation.

20 Gramsci 1971, p. 373.