The crucial conceptual blockage that prevented this new historical moment from being seen in its proper perspective at the time can of course be traced to the symbolic “death of Marxism” identified with the collapse of the Soviet bloc. A theoretical critique that dealt with the global transformations taking place at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries on a level rivaling the greatest contributions of Marxist theory in the past was therefore needed.

Szymanski’s Cycles

In the 1960s and early 1970s Marxian theory (including Marxian influenced critical theory) was arguably the most dynamic force within social theory as a whole. However, by the late 1970s its impact had begun to wane as capitalist societies turned further to the right with the rise of neoliberalism and as the academy shifted to postmodernist deconstruction. This was widely perceived as constituting a crisis of Marxian theory, one that could be traced to the failure of the 1968 revolt in the West—later to be amplified by the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 and fall of the Soviet Union itself in 1991.

In an early response to these developments entitled “Crisis and Vitalization in Marxist Theory,” Al Szymanski (1985) argued that Marxism was not to be seen “as a static system, a linear trend, or a back and forward movement between the same two poles” (p. 315).1 Rather Marxist theory developed through an “oscillation between orthodoxy…and open and eclectic formulations,” exhibiting a cyclical pattern, but with long-run development. Marxian theory, he claimed, could be seen “as repeating a basic cycle of four phases:

(1) a period of energization or impetus; (2) a period of formation/reassertion of revolutionary materialist theory; (3) a period of the watering down of revolutionary formulation; and (4) a period of predominance of explicit ‘revisionism.’”

Szymanski designated “five (or five and-a-half)” cyclical periods up to that point, each designated by its beginning revolutionary upsurge: “1843- 1849; 1864-1871 (the half period); 1884-1906; 1917-1921; 1935-1949 and 1967-1970″ (pp. 315-16).2

Since this was a materialist analysis, the development of ideas was not seen as independent of material conditions. Nor were they, however, to be seen as mere “reflections” of an “economic base.” Rather, as Marx explained, ideas themselves–once they came into being–became a material force. Although the course of Marxist theory reflected changes on the ground, the relatively autonomous cyclical pattern of theory itself (and its continuity and development over the course of these cycles) was a critical issue.

As Szymanski elaborated on his four phases, Phase I exhibited a “’storm the heavens’ mentality…Everything is possible” (p. 317). Phase II was the period in which “seminal theoretical works” were most likely to appear, “often written as pamphlets, polemics or manifestos in Phase I” and then developed further, usually by “young activist leaders” of Phase I. “In some cases,” he wrote, “publication occurs with a considerable delay; e.g., the 1960s works of Marcuse, and of Baran and Sweezy, had been germinating for 25 years” (p. 318). Phase III is the period in which “the disjunction between theory (revolutionary) and practice (reformist) which began to appear toward the end of Phase II becomes dominant.” Here “verbal discourse is still one of orthodox Marxism, but the substance of that discourse…undergoes a fundamental transformation in the direction of idealism, eclecticism, voluntarism, subjectivism, democracy, reformism, and evolutionary politics” ( p.318). Finally, Phase IV is “the period of true crisis in Marxist theory.” Here “the unity of theory and practice is restored—now around an explicitly reformist practice and revisionist theory” (p. 319).

“The minority who persist [in Phase IV] in adhering to orthodox categories, in spite of the withering of the mass movements that had once made them vital, adopt a siege mentality….The cost of maintaining a revolutionary materialist analysis is the crystallization of the disjunction between critical theory and practice….Revolutionary materialism, now cased in a hard shell, has rigidified. But irrelevance nevertheless keeps the seeds of what once was a vital, creative and powerful force alive” (p. 319).

The Fifth Cycle

Szymankski’s main interest, naturally, was the “fifth cycle,” which had its “beginning revolutionary upsurge” in 1967-1970. The distinctive feature of this period, he claimed, was the emphasis on the “Third World,” reflecting the fact that it drew its main inspiration from “developments in China, the Cuban Revolution, the Vietnam [W]ar, and the civil rights struggles in the U.S.” (p. 325). Nevertheless, “by the late 1970s in France and soon thereafter in the rest of the West, a wide variety of individualistic, humanistic, empiricist and reformist ideologies became dominant….The discourse of revolutionary Marxism, after a moment of leading massive demonstrations around 1968, became increasingly isolated from mass struggles (which now were led by confirmed social democrats). Once again the separation of revolutionary Marxist theory and mass movements in the West became complete” (p. 330).

For Szymansksi it was clear “that it is from the needs and experience of revolutionary movements, not the heads of intellectuals, that theoretical advance springs….The energy and imagination of working people spill over to the intelligentsia.” For this reason, he argued, “it is no accident that many of those in the West who are today adherents of orthodox Marxism have ties to the vital mass movements of the less developed countries.” The actual revitalization of Marxist theory in the advanced capitalist countries themselves, however, was likely to occur only as a result of “protracted economic depression or warfare” (p. 331).

The Protracted Crisis

Given that there is no clear mechanism involved in Szymanski’s cycles in revolutionary activity and Marxist theory, which appear to depend to a large extent on the internal contradictions of the system, it would be a mistake to make too much of this periodization, except historically, i.e. after the fact. Nevertheless, it is interesting that his framework points to generational cycles of roughly 20-30 years (perhaps influenced by long waves of capitalist development and the ensuing economic ups and downs and related periods of militarization/demilitarization). Viewed in this way one might have expected a new radical/revolutionary movement and an upsurge in Marxist theory (a new Phase I) to have begun sometime around the late 1980s, or at least by the 1990s. One is tempted therefore to inquire whether there was a missing or delayed sixth cycle in the development of revolutionary practice and Marxist theory. The question may of course seem a bit mechanical. There are too many historical contingencies, too many changing relations, to expect social cycles to fall into a very regular periodization. Nevertheless, the issue of a missing or delayed sixth cycle in the development of Marxian theory does raise some intriguing questions about the historical nature of our time and the actual revitalization of Marxism that we are now witnessing.

The year 1989—about the time that Szymanski’s analysis suggested that a renewal of revolutionary activity could take place as a result of such factors as economic stagnation and war—is in fact remembered as a year of revolution emanating from stagnation and war. But the revolt was against the entrenched ruling classes of the Soviet bloc countries, rather than against capitalism as such, and led to a restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union itself.

Most Western Marxists (Szymanski himself was an exception) had long distanced themselves from developments in the Soviet Union—where the Stalinism of the 1930s had created the conditions for the rise of a new ruling class. Yet, the fall of the Soviet bloc was widely interpreted on the left (as well as the right) as a historical rejection of Marxism. Accompanied as this was by the rise of market fetishism and the fall of European-style social democracy, the result was to reinforce for a considerable period of time the hegemonic view that, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, “there is no alternative.” At the same time capitalism was going through major transition from monopoly capital to global monopoly-finance capital. The stagnation of the accumulation function in the advanced capitalist states and a slowing of the trend-rate of growth were accompanied by a financial explosion and the triumph of financial capital (Foster 2006, 2007). As the world entered the 1990s, therefore, the left was almost everywhere in disarray.

Nevertheless, to see 1989 simply as a year of defeat for the left would be a major error. The turn to finance in the advanced capitalist economy generated its own historically specific ideology of neoliberalism. The global structural crisis of capital underlying these developments reignited class and imperial wars throughout the world, with the assault falling most heavily on those areas of the periphery most firmly under the control of the advanced capitalist states: Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia. Meanwhile, the growth of global environmental crisis in the late 1980s increasingly undermined faith in the system. As a result, the very moment that socialism was being pronounced defeated, the roots of the revitalization of Marxist theory and practice were being laid.

As Ricardo Alarcón, president of the National Assembly of Cuba and its permanent representative to the United Nations, has stated, “So much was said about the fall of the Berlin Wall that few realized that at the same time the Caracazo was taking place. When the impoverished masses took to the streets of the Venezuelan capital (February 27, 1989) to protest against IMF draconian measures and were brutally massacred, the western media kept a despicable silence. However, it was the beginning of a process that no one can deny anymore: the bankruptcy of the neoliberal economic model” and the path to a socialism for the 21st century (Alarcon 2007: 9).

The Revitalization of Marxist Theory

The crucial conceptual blockage that prevented this new historical moment from being seen in its proper perspective at the time can of course be traced to the symbolic “death of Marxism” identified with the collapse of the Soviet bloc. A theoretical critique that dealt with the global transformations taking place at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries on a level rivaling the greatest contributions of Marxist theory in the past was therefore needed.

Beginning in the early 1970s István Mészáros, Lukács’s most brilliant student, and author of the magisterial

Marx’s Theory of Alienation (1971), redirected his research from his major philosophical treatises to the question of the “global structural crisis of capital.” The result of two decades of intensive work was his monumental Beyond Capital (1995). Among his most important innovations was to return to Marx’s original emphasis on the critique of capital generally, as opposed to capitalism specifically. This allowed Mészáros to develop not only a systematic critique of the most advanced stage of monopoly capital, but also to dissect the demise of the Soviet revolution, as a result of the failure to transcend the root capital relation. Mészáros emphasized the need for a more radical democratic socialist revolution that would put the people in charge, merging Rousseau and Marx. Already in 1995 Mészáros had singled out Hugo Chávez as the most brilliant analyst of the Latin American situation, and as its leading potential revolutionary political figure  (pp. 710-12; Mészáros 2007). Chávez himself was to pore over Beyond Capital incorporating it into his conception of revolution, thereby laying the basis for a new revolutionary state that would turn power over to the masses in every institutional way possible, while promoting the general will through the executive power.

The five years from 1998 to 2003 could be seen as a turning point, possibly constituting a new Phase I at the world level. In 1998 Hugo Chávez was elected president in Venezuela and immediately set out through popular mobilization to create a new revolutionary  constitution in Venezuela, a process completed in December 1999, establishing the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Meanwhile, street protests in Seattle in November 1999 helped ignite the anti-capitalist globalization movement, leading to major protests in Europe, the United States and elsewhere in the first two years of the new millennium. The terrorist attacks of September 2001 became a pretext for a new global assault by the U.S. empire, in the form of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and an extension of the U.S. worldwide military base system, aimed at ending the decline of U.S. hegemony and creating a new century of U.S. global domination. This sparked the greatest wave of world anti-war protests in history. The failure of the U.S.-backed coup against Hugo Chávez in 2002 was followed by Chávez’s increasingly open advocacy of a new “socialism for the 21st century,” and his promotion of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, together with Cuba and Bolivia. The election of Evo Morales of the Movement Toward Socialism as president of Bolivia in 2005 (Bolivia’s first indigenous president), the election of Rafael Correa, also an advocate of a “socialism for the 21st century,” as president of Ecuador in 2006, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega’s return to power in the 2006 election in Nicaragua, the electoral and popular revolts in Mexico in 2006-2007, the successful transition in Cuba, coming out of its “Special Period” and emerging as a world leader in ecological restoration, and the continuing resistance of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), constitute elements in a widespread Latin American revolt.3

As the global structural crisis of capital, now extending to the planet itself, has unfolded, issues of imperialism, class inequality, class struggle, and socialism have come back to the fore, while Marxist ecological analysis is transforming the way we think about material relations. The titles of the last five special summer issues of

Monthly Review, point to some of the major world developments: Imperialism Now (2003), China and Socialism (2004), Socialism in the 21st Century (2005), Aspects of Class in the United States (2006), and Revolt in Latin America (2007).

Theorization about socialism, in response to past failures at socialist construction and inspired by the new struggles for socialism in Venezuela and elsewhere, are now developing at a fast pace, particularly among theorists who have focused on third world conditions. In addition, to

Mészáros’s

Beyond Capital, Michael Lebowitz (author of his own important work Beyond Capital [2003]) has authored Build it Now: Socialism for the 21st Century (2006), also praised by Chávez. Mészáros’s soon to be released The Challenge and  Burden of Historical Time (2008, forthcoming) evokes this new revolutionary process, helping to provide a theoretical basis for the Bolivarian revolution (emphasizing the continuity between Rousseau, Bolivar, Marx and Chávez).4 Symbolic of this new period of energization in Marxist theory is a reconsideration of the classics. Thus a new annotated edition of The Communist Manifesto, edited by Phil Gasper (Marx and Engels 2005), corrects past mis-translations into English and connects the Manifesto to today’s revolutionary and class movements, and to gender, race, and environmental  struggles.

Perhaps the most ambitious recent development in Marxist theory, aside from reformulations of state-society relations in the transition to socialism, has been the ecological turn, which is broadening the notion of materialism (in line with Marx’s own analysis), from a primarily economic to a wider ecological form. This theoretical turn had its inception the late  1980s with the growing awareness of planetary ecological crisis associated with the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, and the accelerated ex- tinction of species. A key development was the creation in the late 1980s and 1990s of

Capitalism, Nature, Socialism , with James O’Connor as founding editor. The debates that ensued led to a host of theoretical works, including Carolyn Merchant’s Radical Ecology (1992), O’Connor’s Is Capitalism Sustainable? (1994), Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature (1999) and Marxism and Ecological Economics 2006), my own Marx’s Ecology (2000), Joel Kovel’s The End of Nature,  and Peter Dickens’s  Society and Nature (2004). In the last decade in sociology major Marxist or Marxist-inspired ecological analyses have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review , Theory & Society, Sociological Quarterly, Organization & Environment , Monthly Review, the Socialist Register , and elsewhere (see, for example, Foster 1999; York, Rosa, and Dietz, 2003; Foster and Clark 2004; Clark and York 2005a; Clark and York 2005b; Clausen and Clark 2005; Burkett and Foster 2006; Clausen 2007). This work, though having its epicenter in the United States, has been most influential in the periphery of the capitalist world economy, where radical ecological struggles are occurring in Latin America, Asia and Africa. In its Special Period Cuba became a world leader in organic agriculture. And Fidel Castro, in 2007, emerged as a major commentator on world ecological problems.5

We have therefore entered what might be considered, in Szymanski’s terms, a new vital phase of Marxist theory, which like all previous such phases has its distinctive traits: its focus is on the periphery, its search for a revolutionary-democratic collectivism, and its ecological-materialist analysis. Yet, there was clearly a long down phase in the fifth cycle of Marxian theory, resulting from the effects that the downfall of the Soviet bloc (occurring simultaneously with a new global capitalist assault in the form of neoliberalism) had on left consciousness. The revitalization of Marxist theory began not in the late 1980s but in the late 1990s.6

Further, the revitalization has lagged even more in the advanced capitalist West (with some exceptions, such as, theorists linked to the third world, and ecological analysis). Despite the growing evidence of the global structural crisis of capital, the disappearance of a supposed social democratic alternative has left would-be radicals with no mid-point between liberalism and Marxism, requiring a much greater leap than in the past. The Thatcherite “there is no alternative” still holds considerable sway. In this situation, erstwhile, self-styled leftists caught up in an atmosphere of defeat still cast around for postmodernist and post-Marxist straws. Hence, the remarkable phenomenon that in 2000, even as revolutionary struggle and imperialist war were beginning to heat up once again, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) got enormous favorable publicity (partly as a result of the warm reception of the media monopoly) for their post- Marxist claim that imperialism had ended with the Vietnam War, and that a new constitutional order of globalized “Empire” based on Jeffersonian democracy was opening up for the world multitude. A kind of classical revisionism thus thrust forward in the West effacing all other tendencies at the very moment that Marxist theory was revitalizing in the world as a whole.7

History has no end. Claims that socialism and Marxist theory were dead and the Empire triumphant misunderstood the nature of the historical process, and now have been proven wrong. Just as human actors make history, they can remake it, but only under definite conditions inherited from the past. Such remaking is again possible in our time.

– John Bellamy Foster

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