What is Revolution in the 21st Century? Towards a Socialist-Feminist World Revolution

Introduction

The 21st century is significantly different from the 20th, particularly with respect to the ‘opportunity structures’ available to revolution and resistance movements. ¹ In this article I consider prospects for a feminist-inflected and socialist world revolution, along with the need for strategy and coordination to strengthen those prospects. The article draws on my previous work on gender dynamics of revolutions and resistance movements, which began with a study comparing and contrasting revolution and gender politics in Iran and Afghanistan, followed by a model of gendered revolutionary outcomes differentiated by patriarchal versus egalitarian ideologies and agendas, in which I examined the French, Bolshevik, and Chinese revolutions as well as the array of Third World revolutions of the mid-to-late 20th century: Algeria, Vietnam, Democratic Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. ² More recently, I re-examined my earlier work on gender and revolution, the concept and idea of revolution itself, developments within the Global Justice Movement, and the disappointing outcomes of the Arab Spring and the Latin American ‘pink tide’. The aim was to study prospects for a world revolution influenced by a socialist-feminist vision. ³ Here I elaborate on my current thinking while also highlighting what can be gained both conceptually and politically from a world-system perspective on revolution and from lessons of the past.

Revolutions Past and Present

The global impact and long-reaching influence of both the 1789 French Revolution and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution cannot be denied, as they inspired numerous revolutionary movements in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as a prodigious literature. In one now-classic study, Theda Skocpol defined revolution as rapid class-based social, political, and ideological transformation and compared the French, Bolshevik, and Chinese revolutions. ⁴ These were what she called social revolutions – a thoroughgoing transformation that she also applied to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Causal factors of the revolutions of what we might call the long 19th century included the contradictions of the transition from agrarian to industrial society, including the exploitation of working people, accompanied by the shift in power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, along with the weakening of the state by war or internal fissures. In the 20th century, Third World revolutions in Asia, Africa and Latin America were inspired by the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions and occurred in a global context of an international system divided into capitalist and communist blocs, along with the diffusion of notions of anti-imperialist national liberation. Women’s liberation was an essential component of some of the revolutions.

It seems to me, however, that the era of the great revolutions of the past as well as the Third World revolutions has come to an end. This is because of the profound structural and geopolitical transformations at the level of the capitalist world-system: the collapse of the Non-Aligned Movement and the idea of a New International Economic Order; the end of the Soviet bloc and of world communism, which so many revolutionary movements could count on for material and diplomatic support and which they could help expand; and the consolidation of neoliberal capitalist globalisation in the 1990s. The so-called revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe helped consolidate the triumph of global capitalism, and they were followed in the early 1990s by the defeat of socialist experiments in southern Yemen (the former People’s Democratic Party of Yemen) and in Afghanistan (the former Democratic Republic of Afghanistan). An emboldened USA, the hegemonic power of the capitalist world-system, then cast the Middle East into turmoil through its invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. The so-called ‘colour revolutions’ of Georgia and Ukraine were little more than changes of government and were influenced by American meddling. These realities make the sort of class-based, state-building rapid transformation projects of past social revolutions almost impossible to conceive, let alone achieve.

What came in their place were the anti-globalisation movement of the 1990s and into the new century, along with other horizontal, non-hierarchical, prefigurative, network-based movements and campaigns, many of them eventually convening at the World Social Forum (WSF), followed by numerous studies celebrating such movements. ⁵ At the same time, Islamist movements were gaining support in Muslim-majority countries, and became the subject of a growing literature on their popularity and hybrid agendas. ⁶ But jihadist groups proliferated, too, wreaking havoc in Muslim-majority countries and in the new century, in Western countries as well. ⁷ Many of the jihadi fighters in Algeria’s dreadful civil conflict of the 1990s were veterans of the US-supported jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s and early 1990s. More recently, the world has witnessed the rise of right-wing populist-nationalist movements, parties, and governments. Is the era of visionary and emancipatory revolution over?

The Arab Spring is presumed to have launched revolutions. What was telling about them, however, was their lack of leadership and ideology. Tunisia’s more limited political revolution succeeded in effecting a procedural democratic transition, and on several occasions the left forces coalesced around a united front, but these efforts did not last. Moreover, Tunisia has faced serious economic difficulties emanating from an entrenched neoliberal capitalist world-economy. Revolution no longer seems to mean a worker-led – much less a peasant-led – seizure of state power through a vanguard party that enacts the appropriation of all private property for redistribution. What it does mean seems to be up for grabs. In her keynote address at the Millennium Conference, Jodi Dean offered a taste of the appropriation and co-optation of ‘revolution’ and ‘resistance’ by media, retailers, and even some neoliberal politicians. To my mind, when rebels in Libya and Syria are referred to as revolutionaries – especially when their platform or plan for socio-economic transformation and cultural change and for women’s participation and rights is anyone’s guess – then today we have a problem with the idea and definition of revolution.

Not every uprising, revolt, or rebellion is revolutionary in the progressive sense of the word. In various writings, I have argued that it all depends on the composition of the revolutionary movement, its ideology and agenda. Nor is every resistance movement revolutionary or progressive. In Globalization and Social Movements, I show that global feminism, global Islamism, and the global justice movement are all forms of resistance to neoliberal capitalist globalisation, but have very different discourses and agendas. ⁸ Elsewhere, I compare two resistance movements in Tunisia, the Islamist and the feminist, highlighting their mutual antipathy and divergent agendas in the period 2011–2014. ⁹ In a limited sense, Islamist movements may appear anti-systemic, but they do not conform to Wallerstein’s conceptualisation of anti-systemic movements as striving for more liberty, equality, and fraternity. ¹⁰ Unlike the expansive, egalitarian vision of Islamic feminists such as those involved with the international network Musawah, ¹¹ political Islam is a closed and exclusionary worldview.

Nor is every non-violent social movement devoid of revolutionary potential. Many social movements, such as the early years of second-wave feminism, had far-reaching and transformative goals. But revolutions, resistance movements, and social movements – and especially the most progressive, emancipatory, and forward-looking of them – exist within an entrenched, unequal, unjust, and hierarchical world-system, and they must contend with ruling classes and core powers that simply do not want fundamental change. Thus, for example, the revolutionary potential of second-wave feminism, the American civil rights and especially Black Power movement, third-wave democratisation movements, the anti-globalisation movement, the Latin American pink tide, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street – all these movements had to be ‘moderated’, tamed, or otherwise undermined.

What has emerged in their place? As noted, this century has seen the rise of right-wing populist-nationalist movements, political parties, and governments. They draw on the support of hardened right-wingers, to be sure, but also citizens who have been left behind by decades of neoliberal economic policy, austerity, and neglect. ¹² Many of those citizens also are fearful of the economic and cultural effects of the massive wave of immigrants and refugees – in turn the result of state destabilisations, the failures of neoliberal economic policies, and wars. ¹³ Such citizens rightly blame the established parties for the migrant and refugee influx as well as the welfare cutbacks, and they trust that the new right-wing parties can turn the tide. Sentiments such as these have led to right-wing electoral gains in the United States, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and now even Andalusia in Spain. The popularity of the religio-nationalist governments in Israel, Turkey, and India might have somewhat different causes but are part of the rise of the Global Right. Almost all such parties and governments are decidedly anti-feminist. ¹⁴

Parallel to the rise of the Global Right, however, are progressive alternatives such as Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution in the US, the British Labour Party under Corbyn, Spain’s Podemos, Portugal’s Left Bloc, the Front Populaire in Tunisia, and left-wing Green parties in many countries, including the USA. Could their membership and influence grow – as opposed to what happened to Greece’s Syriza? Could they build bridges and indeed coalitions with trade unions and feminist organisations to form powerful transnational social movement organisations that could challenge the powers-that-be and form what Christopher Chase-Dunn and his colleagues have called the World Revolution of 20xx spearheaded by the New Global Left? ¹⁵

On World Revolution

World-system scholars have introduced the concept of ‘world revolution’ – acts of resistance that are not necessarily coordinated but that occur relatively close to one another in time, are generated by cycles and waves of accumulation and crisis, diffuse across space, and influence subsequent movements and revolutions that become transformative. ¹⁶ In Antisystemic Movements, Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein described how the world revolutions of 1848 and 1968 may have failed – ‘the bubble of popular enthusiasm and radical innovations was burst within a relatively short period’ – but also transformed the world. ¹⁷ The 1848 revolutions institutionalised what came to be known as the Old Left and constituted a dress rehearsal for the Paris Commune and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, as well as other anti-systemic movements, including those in Mexico, China, and Iran in the early 20th century, and all the national liberation movements. I would add that the worldwide spread of communism and socialism opened the political and discursive space for women’s participation and rights that became so visible later in the century.

The events of 1968 – protests in France, Mexico, Italy, the USA, and Czechoslovakia, and I would add the Iranian student movement protests in Cologne in 1967 ¹⁸ – institutionalised what came to be known later as the new social movements, but Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein left open the question of what it prefigured. While acknowledging the new social movements’ priorities and identities – including gender, generation, ethnicity, race, disability, and sexuality – they asserted that ‘the contradiction between labour and capital, given both the increasing centralization of capital and the increasing marginalization of large sectors of the labour force, will remain elemental’. ¹⁹ Indeed, it has. But without a vanguard party and having been abandoned by the established parties that embraced neoliberalism, labour appears to be lost in so many countries, often gravitating towards the Right. ²⁰

Since 1989, the new social movements have grown, many of the traditional left-wing parties and their partner labour unions have weakened or withered away, and the practice of ‘horizontalism’ – which eschews traditional hierarchical structures and formal political organisations and prefers direct, face-to-face democratic deliberation – has spread. A two-part volume written largely by WSF participants includes numerous contributions in defence of horizontalism and prefigurative politics and against old-style ‘vertical’ forms of organising and strategising. ²¹ One contribution analyses the anti-globalisation movement in terms of its division into two main parallel processes: ‘radical, anarchic, confrontation, prefigurative in its politics, decentralised, non-hierarchical, anti-capitalist, anti-statist. [The other] is reformist, hierarchical, and more centralised, and involves civil society/ NGO and more traditional political groups’. ²² Of course, the ‘more centralised’ political groups could very well have a revolutionary agenda, and not necessarily an anarchic one. Indeed, Michael Lowy argues that the diversity of the global justice movement notwithstanding, ‘socialism is the name of this utopia … shared by Marxists and anarchists, radical Christians and left ecologists, as well as by a significant number of activists in the labour, peasant, feminist, and indigenous movements’. ²³ Earlier, Walden Bello had written admiringly of the ability of both horizontals and verticals to work together at the WSF and not seek to dominate the other or impose its own approach. ²⁴ But how does the ‘movement of movements’ get to the socialist democracy that Lowy aspires to, or the common strategy that Bello calls for? What would the revolution look like, and how would it come about? Should we be looking not for individual and disparate episodes of radical action but rather for clusters of potentially anti-systemic activity held together by a common agenda?

In The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism, Boswell and Chase-Dunn explain that world revolutions are clusters of revolutionary activity and social movements, including separatist and colonial revolutions. ²⁵ As with the analysis by Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein, this is an expanded definition of revolution; rather than a singular, episodic event, world revolution is seen as a cyclical and diffusive process whereby demands and objectives persist across time and space. Drawing attention also to the pivotal role of the semi-periphery in the world-system (in a sense, as its ‘weak link’, apologies to Lenin), Boswell and Chase-Dunn write:

[A] cluster of revolts in the semiperiphery, when matched with demands from core social movements and peripheral states, could suddenly make debated issues of global standards an obvious solution. This would in retrospect appear to be a world revolution, one that would initiate new movements for global change. ²⁶

In other writings, Chase-Dunn has pointed out that instead of the sort of violent revolutions or coups that predominated in the past, the 21st century movements have preferred peaceful protests and the ballot box. The non-violent nature of such movements is made by John Foran and colleagues about the ‘new political cultures of opposition and creation’, which include social movements for climate justice. ²⁷ In this perspective, therefore, the once-firm distinction between revolution and social movements is replaced by an examination of movements for radical social transformation and system change, or anti-systemic activity within what some call global civil society. ²⁸ Especially promising is the New Global Left, those groups critical of neoliberal and capitalist globalisation and which include popular forces, social movements, and progressive political parties and national regimes. ²⁹ In their separate writings, William Carroll and Jackie Smith and colleagues highlight the growing presence of Southern-based movements as well as policy and activist groups that critique neoliberalism and offer alternative visions and policy formulations. ³⁰ It goes without saying that misogynistic and violent armed groups such as Al-Qaeda, ISIS/ISIL/IS/Daesh, the Taliban of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, and the rebels of Libya and Syria have no future in any world revolution or coalition. Among other ills, they have no programme for progressive socio-economic change and are anti-democratic.

Analysing the participants of the WSF and US Social Forum between 2005 and 2010, Chase-Dunn and his colleagues find strong movement linkages – for example, across feminist, human rights, fair trade, health, environmental, peace and similar issues – and a concern for climate justice being common to all. Could concern over the ecological crisis, described poignantly and persuasively by Naomi Klein, ³¹ begin to bring disparate movements and networks together in a powerful mobilisation against seemingly endless capital accumulation and growth? Perhaps.

In adopting the notion of world revolution as a cluster of revolts with progressive aims, the scholar could situate the events of 2011 in the anti-globalisation protests that had taken place over a decade before; recall the Green Protests in Iran in 2009 and the nationwide protests for economic justice in early 2018, along with Turkey’s Gezi Park protests in 2013; and consider the plight and potential of ‘the precariat’, educated young people who can look forward not to steady jobs with good wages and benefits, but underemployment and short-term jobs in what some euphemistically call ‘the gig economy’. ³² The protests in early 2018 in Iran and Tunisia over economic hardships, and those in autumn 2018 of the French gilets jaunes – citizens angry about a fuel tax on top of the financial burdens they already carry while the rich are given a tax break – suggest the extent of dissatisfaction with the neoliberal capitalist status quo. One also might note that many trade unions around the world, such as the one in Tunisia, are resolutely anti-neoliberal, as are many of the new progressive political parties across the globe.

Let us recall that the global justice movement and the 2011 revolts seemed to be promoting a type of global Keynesianism, or left-wing social democracy, with redistribution of wealth and meaningful employment for all, and care for the planet; and they were against authoritarianism and for a democracy that delivered social rights and human dignity. Given the state of our contemporary world – with its gross inequalities, wars, environmental degradation, and democracy deficits – such a vision is actually a fairly radical one and would be welcomed by people across the world. It is also worth noting that many young people in the precariat, along with other ‘millennials’, have taken part in those movements, supporting Bernie Sanders in the US and voting for Green parties in Europe; collectively they could become a major force in future anti-systemic revolts.

In other words, there does appear to be a global movement constellation – the New Global Left – that could connect the dots, so to speak (and by ‘dots’ I mean the disparate protests of the present century) and work together to generate systemic change. But the feminist might ask: what’s in it for us? Although my earlier research on revolution did distinguish between those revolutions that favoured women’s participation and rights and those that did not, many movements have tended to remain male-dominated. At the WSF, the series of Feminist Dialogues that took place echoed the wider critiques of neoliberalism and demands for a better world. But they also emphasised reproductive rights, recognition and redistribution of caring activities, and bringing more women into decision-making. To make the case for a feminist-inflected world revolution, one in which women and socialist demands will be prominent, I offer several observations.

Women, Feminism and World Revolution ³³

Women’s organisations have helped to build civil societies and social movements nationally and globally, feminist organisations exist in almost every country, and transnational feminist networks and women’s non-governmental organisations (NGOs) often coordinate activities. ³⁴ Women’s peace groups, such as Code Pink and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, take strong positions against militarism, war, environmental degradation, and all forms of violence against women. Feminists from various countries as well as groups such as Marche Mondiale des Femmes/World March of Women have been vocal and visible at the World Social Forum and have issued radical critiques and alternative visions. They also have been visible in nationally-based movements. For example, women were visible in an almost unprecedented way in all the 2011 Arab Spring revolts, the 2009 Green Protests in Iran, and the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey. Sustained feminist activism in Tunisia between 2011 and 2014 was responsible for the retention of key legal gains and the adoption of pro-feminist constitutional articles. The Global Women’s March of January 2017 and the marches of January 2018, along with the #MeToo and #Time’sUp campaigns – which now recognise the sexual harassment and abuse of working-class women in many occupations – may signal a new era of concerted cross-class feminist activism against patriarchal practices and attitudes.

The precariat includes many educated young women who are unemployed or lack a steady job. In many countries of the Middle East, North Africa, and southern Mediterranean, female youth unemployment, including that of college-educated young women, can be as high as 20 percent to 30 percent. Such young women, therefore, have economic reasons to help constitute a world revolution. Millennials in general are displaying political acumen in their dissatisfaction with the status quo, such as the overwhelming presence of young women of different ethnicities in the March for Our Lives protests of 24 March 2018 against gun violence in the US. What all these examples show is that women and feminist demands will be far more prominent in the world revolution of 20xx than has been the case in the past. The reality of the 21st century is very different from where women and feminist demands were in most of the 20th century revolutions and resistance movements.

If past revolutions, and even many of the older social movements, were dominated by men, today’s social realities – including the presence of women across professions and occupations, their involvement in all manner of movements, organisations, networks, and political parties, and leadership and creativity in their own organisations, movements, and networks – means that women will be key players in any future revolution. Indeed, just as Tunisia’s political revolution succeeded in part because of the concerted efforts of women, feminists, and their allies (in contrast to Libya, Syria, and Yemen, where women and women’s rights issues were side-lined), the world revolution of 20xx will succeed only with the continued full integration of women, their organisations, and their concerns and demands. But this will also depend on the capacity of feminist activists themselves to integrate socio-economic and class concerns in their agendas.

Cross-class solidarity is crucial to mobilise as broad a female base of support as possible for a new vision and policies that oppose patriarchy, militarism and war. Especially important is attention to the economic injustices that afflict working-class and poor women, from the absence of decent jobs, paid maternity leave, and public transport to the high cost of schooling, healthcare, and housing. Many feminist economists have offered trenchant critiques of neoliberalism’s effects on poor and working-class women’s burdens in the spheres of production and reproduction alike, and they have argued for greater resource allocations towards social services or ‘the care economy’. ³⁵ Such a focus is necessary if we are to weaken the base of right-wing populist movements, including Islamist movements. Feminist activism should not cede the concerns of working-class women or even women with religious values to the right-wing. This might be difficult given disagreements among women regarding sexual and reproductive rights. Bridge-building might start with the valorisation of mothering and care through institutional supports for maternal employment and guaranteed healthcare for mothers, children, and elders; this aspect of a wide-ranging feminist agenda could help unite women across class, ethnicity, race, and generation, especially in the US. And condemnation of all forms of violence against women – including domestic violence and workplace sexual harassment and abuse – should continue, as the problem is shared across classes and cultures.

Strategy, Coordination and Internationalism

In recent years there have been numerous causes and revolts that could in retrospect make up our world revolution – pro-democracy movements and protests against dictatorships; opposition to globalisation and austerity measures; women’s rights activism; the environmental movement and concerns over climate change; anger over corporate power, abuse, and lack of accountability; and activism for peace and against militarism. For observers such as myself, fundamental change in the US seems an almost impossible dream. But could Black Lives Matter, the Dreamers campaign, the Standing Rock protest in North Dakota, the Fight for Fifteen to raise the minimum wage, peace and anti-militarist activism, and the March for Our Lives campaign become strategically connected so that these ‘moments’ come to constitute a powerful mass movement for radical social transformation, in the US and beyond? We also need to ask: If the New Global Left will not only check the spread of the Global Right but also spearhead world revolution in 20xx, how will it do so? In my judgement, it will not be enacted through a continuation of horizontal movements only weakly or episodically connected to each other.

If the concept of world revolution as a world-historical cluster of revolts with progressive aims enables the scholar to imagine the future of revolution as something other than a one-off episodic national affair (albeit one that was always deeply embedded in world-systemic processes), that still leaves open the question of strategy and coordination. And for that, we need to look back for guidance. For if today’s global realities seem to militate against a repeat of the great revolutions of the past or the 20th century Third World revolutions, they also seem to require a return to some aspects of previous revolutionary organising and mobilising, such as internationalism and coordination.

I would argue that in order to bring about lasting change, the many disparate causes, revolts, and mobilisations require a coordinating mechanism. At present there remains one forum at which such issues are discussed and where the varied groups converge – the WSF. Many activists and engaged intellectuals have given up on the capacity of the WSF to go beyond discussion and dialogue and to forge a common plan of action to counter capitalist power at local, national, regional, and global levels. Walden Bello underscored the need for the WSF to ‘give way to new modes of global organization and resistance and transformation’. ³⁶ The charter of the WSF expressly forbids the formulation of a political programme or even working with progressive political parties, and ‘a significant group of participants strongly supports maintaining the WSF as an “open space” for debate and organising’. ³⁷ Others, however, have supported a more concerted political orientation, including a ‘global united front’ and a more explicit political manifesto. As Jennifer Ross asks: ‘Does the global justice movement provide the intellectual, political, and strategic resources to counter power in its neoliberal, capitalist, or imperialist guises?’ ³⁸ Similarly, in an essay discussing the various Internationals of the communist movement, the late Samir Amin asks: Who will challenge the new imperialist order, and how? It is time, he writes, for a Fifth International. ³⁹

In the period after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Third International, also known as the COMINTERN, mobilised the world’s socialist and communist parties around specific issues and campaigns. Other large coalitions were the United Front and the Popular Front, both active during World War II. Could one of those models – albeit without the dogmatism and infighting of the past – inspire a more effective WSF? It is worth noting that many of the right-wing populist-nationalist parties and leaderships which have formed or won elections in recent years seem to be in some form of regular contact with each other, in part through the roving ambassador of the populist-nationalist Right, Steve Bannon. Islamist parties, too, especially those of the Muslim Brotherhood variety, communicate and cooperate across borders. For our part, could we have a more strategic approach to the idea of world revolution, and try to connect the disparate and fragmented protests through a coordinating mechanism? A first step might be to revisit and update the 2005 Porto Alegre Manifesto, signed by 19 prominent WSF participants and outlining 12 proposals on economic measures, peace and justice, and democracy, ‘to give sense and direction to the construction of another, different world’. ⁴⁰ The proposals in that manifesto align with the recent call for a Progressive International, an initiative of the (Bernie) Sanders Institute in Vermont, USA, and DiEM25, cofounded by the former Syriza finance minister Yannis Varoufakis. ⁴¹ Similar proposals have been offered, such as that by Heikki Patomäki for a world political party. ⁴² Could we be seeing movement toward the making of a global united front?

The making of such a movement will not be a simple task, and there will be objections on the part of many ‘horizontals’ as well as those engaged in exclusive identity projects. But then, such dispersion and division are precisely what reinforce the capitalist world-system. A return to a more formal organising structure with clear political goals and a unified strategy to achieve those goals through alliances with like-minded political parties across the globe could finally pose a more serious challenge to the current global system and prevent its capture by the extreme right. The feminist-inflected world revolution proposed here could finally realise the dream that ‘another world is possible’.