Ellen
Meiksins Wood died on January 14.
Ms.
Wood was a prolific academic, writing many books and articles from a
Marxist perspective. Among her peers, her work on the transition from
feudalism to capitalism, the advocacy of so-called “political
Marxism,” and her views on Ancient modes of production are
remembered.
With
a broader audience, she will be remembered for her staunch defense of
classical Marxism at a time of full retreat.
After
the fall of the Soviet Union, most of Western Marxism—both
Party-based and otherwise—lost its way. Disillusionment and despair
held sway. In academic circles, a period of “rethinking” Marxism
grew like a virus. The fundamentals of classical Marxism were
challenged by the supposed rigor of rational choice theory on one
hand and the wildly wielded scalpel of post-modernism on the other.
Rational
choice theory announced ominously that the Marxist foundation was not
and could not be built on the basis of homo
economicus,
a result that was both obvious and welcome to any serious student of
Marx. Nonetheless, so-called “Analytical Marxism” took a toll.
A
wave of epistemological relativism penetrated Western political
thought from its pretentious and esoteric perch in European--
especially French-- universities. The idea that we could not defend
any
foundation for our world views apart from our own subjective and
uniquely shaped perspective took hold. The fact that thinkers
formerly associated with Marxism promulgated these views carried
considerable weight in the English-speaking world. The unity that
Marxism had striven to achieve between workers and other oppressed
groups was shattered into a multitude of self-reflecting identities
by the post-modern turn. Students and budding intellectuals hurled
the epithet of “reductionism” at every effort to reveal
underlying structures or processes.
The
expansion of world markets to previously market-adverse economies
dramatically boosted trade and investment to new levels. Theorists
dubbed this quantitative burst “globalization” and hastily
heralded it as a new stage of capitalism. Some went further, counting
it as a harbinger of a world with transnational corporations
overruling the governance of historically constructed states.
Indeed,
it was an ugly time. Nonsense abounded.
The
intellectual climate fed a similar floundering of the activist left
in the nineties. Socialism, as a societal vision, was diluted into a
regimen of “social markets” or receded behind the allure of
anarchism and spontaneity. The fuzzy, unfocussed anti-globalization
movement replaced anti-imperialism as the organizing principle of the
left. A nostalgic yearning for the supposed golden era of post-World
War Two prosperity and a thread-bare safety net substituted for the
quest for full social justice—“revolution” was retired.
It
was in this context that Ellen Meiksins Wood declared war on the
navel-gazers, the timid, and the opportunists abandoning Marxism.
Even before the fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing Western
ideological Great Plague, she exposed the “new,” eviscerated
Marxism in her Retreat
from Class (1986).
Reflecting upon it years later in a new introduction, she wrote:
People
have, in their various ways, moved on, in ways that have very little
to do with Marxism, or even socialism, except to repudiate it. It
seems clear that Post-Marxism was just a short pit-stop on the way to
anti-Marxism.
The Retreat
from Class
(1998)
She
carried out much of her struggle against traitors, slackers, and
opportunists in the pages of Monthly
Review while
serving as co-editor with Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff from 1997 to
2000.
Her
stinging attacks on the globalization thesis (‘Globalization’ or
‘globaloney’?), along with the equally biting polemics by Doug
Henwood, were aimed at anyone who would dare to defend it:
“…globalization…is the heaviest ideological albatross around
the neck of the left today.” (MR,
February 1997)
Wood
saw the global dominance of markets not as a defeat, but as an
opportunity for the left:
Now
capitalism has no more escape routes, no more safety valves or
corrective mechanisms outside its own internal logic… So maybe it’s
time for the left to see the universalization of capitalism not just
as a defeat for us but also as an opportunity—and that, of course
above all means a new opportunity for that unfashionable thing called
class struggle. (Back
to Marx, MR,
June, 1997)
The
recurring theme in Ellen Meiksins Wood’s writings was the
centrality of class struggle. Against the tide of New Leftism,
neo-Marxism, post-Marxism, post-modernism, and other wooly, confused
departures from Marxism, she saw the working class as the essential
agent for change.
When
Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward engaged her on the pages of
Monthly
Review
(January, 1998), challenging her “nostalgia for the working-class
formations of the industrial era” and asserting that “We are all
social democrats now,” she responded sharply:
‘There
are no
social-democrats now.’ People are waking up to the fact that social
democracy is not a viable option. For those who have tended to
identify social democracy with socialism,
there seems to be no other alternative to capitalism—in fact no
alternative to the more inhumane, neoliberal forms of capitalism. So
the loss of social democracy is for them indeed an awesome one. It is
for them a more cataclysmic and perhaps even final loss than for
those who, while certainly supporting the welfare state or any
amelioration of capitalism’s destructive consequences, have always
doubted the long term sustainability of capitalism “with a human
face.” Those who used to place all their hopes in social democracy
are inclined to explain their awesome loss not by conceding that a
humane capitalism was
never
sustainable in the long term but by invoking some massive epochal
shift which had destroyed what used to be, but no longer is, a real
possibility.
In
answer to the then fashionable skepticism toward the socialist
project, Ms. Wood asserted that the naysayers could offer nothing
beyond “a better and maybe more humane management of ‘flexible’
capitalism,” an insight that presages by nearly two decades the
principled refusal of Greek Communists today to join SYRIZA in the
management of capitalism.
Lest
anyone believe that Wood harbored any illusions about reformism apart
from the goal of socialism, she offered the following thoughts to a
1999 forum in South Africa which included participants from the ANC,
COSATU, and the South African Communist Party:
My
main point is that there can be struggles and objectives short of a
socialist transformation, but there can’t be such a thing as a
Third Way. There really is no middle ground between capitalism and
socialism.
That’s
not a paradox. It simply means that all oppositional struggles…
should be informed by one basic perception: the class struggle can’t,
either by its presence or by its absence, eliminate the
contradictions in the capitalist system, even though it can
ultimately eliminate the system itself… without falling into the
hopeless trap of believing that the left can do a better job of
managing capitalism. Managing capitalism is not the job of
socialists, but, more particularly, it’s not the job that can be
done at all. (MR,
September, 1999)
No
doubt events have played the largest role in washing away much of the
ideological fashions that enjoyed such popularity with the Western
left in the 1990s. Endless wars, exploding inequality, and an epochal
economic crisis make what appeared to be learned assessments and
ominous projections appear little more than naïve.
We
should not forget, however, how important it was to have a few
courageous voices defend principle against the current, to stand firm
while others were in full retreat.
Ellen
Meiksins Wood was one.
Zoltan
Zigedy
