challenge: From anti-capitalism to class consciousness, The

Socialist Review, 2001 by Hennessy, Rosemary

For many of us, the year 2000 held great promise for social movement in the United States. The battle in Seattle against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in November, the April 16 convergence on Washington, D.C., protesting the policies and practices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, and the wave of student-led organizing against sweatshops on campuses across the country signaled that a new critical consciousness might be emerging. The most remarkable feature of this mobilizing is that it is actually naming capitalism as the problem. For years the U.S. left has been charmed by anti- and post-Marxist rhetoric and seduced by claims that "there is no alternative" to the current system. With few exceptions, the identity politics that has dominated most organized political activity here in the past two decades has aggressively disparaged sustained critique of capitalism.

In academic circles postmodernisms have entirely ignored relations of labor. Indeed, for a time it seemed that the left's domination by various versions of postmodern identity politics had almost eliminated the very word "capitalism" from public debate. And so when thousands of people poured into the streets this year to protest the violence and damage caused by capitalism, and students across the country denounced the exploited labor woven into the fabric of their universities' sweatwear, it seemed that a new social movement might be brewing.

One notable feature of this recent upsurge of anti-capitalist protest is that it doesn't seem to be replacing the concerns of identity-based groups so much as offering new common ground on which to re-orient them. Slogans like "Human Need Not Corporate Greed" speak to the priorities of organized labor and women, environmental activists, and advocates for immigrant and prisoner rights by pointing to the shared terrain of deprived human needs on which most people's lives meet and insisting that these losses are directly linked to the accumulation of profit. What an epistemological shift this seems, what a breakthrough from the coalition politics in which the U.S. left has been mired.

Or is it? By August 2000 those of us who didn't go to Los Angeles were listening to reports that the protests outside the Democratic Convention were "incoherent." While the accuracy of the corporate media is hardly to be trusted here (this is, after all, the same media that represented the protesters in Seattle as a pack of vandals), still, I think that we might read their evaluation as a cautionary tale. At least it points to the fragility of these anti-capitalist stirrings that hover so precariously on the edge of anything we might call a movement. That the repressive state and powerful corporate spin-doctors will rally quickly against anti-capitalist activity is hardly a secret. For months mainstream news stories warned that Philadelphia and Los Angeles police were learning their lessons from Seattle and training for the conventions. And indeed they did. The criminalizing of protest this summer was swift and brutal. In Philadelphia John Sellers, head of the Ruckus Society, was arrested and charged with carrying "an instrument of crime" - a telephone. Hundreds of others were seized under the excuse of "preventative detention." Regardless of the relative "incoherence" of these demonstrations (an incoherence the media might well have judged less harshly had they measured it against the rhetoric of the two corporate parties!), given the absence of a strong socialist or labor presence in the United States for generations, the emergence of an organized movement that explicitly targets capitalism is certainly something to foster. What I offer below are my comments on areas where I think this emergent movement will need to be strengthened. They come from my standpoint as a Marxist critic and my work in a range of projects that are based both in and outside the academy - in my writing and teaching, in work with my union, with the Sweat-Free SUNY Coalition, with several other local and New York State solidarity networks and with a tri-national organization that fosters international solidarity and is actively building the labor movement on the U.S.-Mexican border. The message I offer in the five points below has been shaped by lessons I have learned in all of these arenas, and it amounts to this: for the social movement that is stirring in the United States the major challenge lies in shifting from anti-capitalist slogans to building class consciousness. When I say "class consciousness" I mean the recognition that we who labor inside and outside the marketplace are the ultimate actors in history. And it is because of this fact that together we are the ones who hold the power. Developing this consciousness is, of course, no mean task. Perhaps it is not even possible to achieve on a mass scale in my lifetime or in yours. But the prerequisite for advancing social movement against capitalism is to believe that this consciousness and the action it provokes for transformation are possible. In the process, Marxism's critique of capital and solidarity with organized struggles outside the United States are not only helpful but necessary reinforcements.