Review article: Catalyst - A Return to Class

Marnie Holborow

Parker union activist in the independent Richmond Progressive Alliance in Califor- nia, Mike Davis, Sam Ashman and Trevor Ngwane from the Socialist Workers Party tradition, and many others. The first two issues of Catalyst look promising indeed. The introductory edi- torial lays out the political ground, post- Trump. The crisis of legitimacy in US capitalism, arising from massive income inequality has exposed both the fault- lines of a weakened, ‘not your parents’ The first two issues of Catalyst. See catalyst-journal. capitalism’, and the Republicans and the for more information. com Democrats as the neoliberal twins of the mega wealthy. The ensuing political vac- uum explains the rise of the Trump Right Catalyst is a new quarterly journal and the surge of popular anger against published by the popular, US radical left poverty and racism. In Europe, it notes, journal, Jacobin. Its co-editor, social- the radical left has led mobilizations ist and historian, Robert Brenner, argues against austerity in three distinct phases: that the left in the US right now has an on the streets and squares marked by au- opening of the sort that it has not had in tonomous anti-politics, via electoralism living memory. and capitulation to ‘office without power’ Jacobin has a print magazine of over as Syriza did, and through workers’ ac- 30,000 subscribers and a web audience of tion and the nuit debout movement as in a million a month and certainly reflects France in 2016. By contrast in the US, the upsurge of interest in socialism in the there has been ‘a stunning failure’ on the US. Catalyst expressly aims to address part of the opposition movements to ‘de- more theoretical and strategic issues con- rive the necessary political lessons in or- fronting the left. der to take the struggle forward and to The journal is in part a product of the build political organizations or develop rapidly expanding Democratic Socialists political programmes’. This is the ‘yawn- of America (DSA), whose membership, at ing gap’ that Catalyst aims to confront. the last count, had risen to 25,000. Ja- Putting the working class at the centre cobin’s editor Baskar Sunkara is the vice- of the fractured political landscape would chair of DSA. Contributors to the first is- seems to be central political message of sue, Chris Maisano and Joseph Schwarz, Catalyst. The articles which do this are are on the DSA national political commit- worth reviewing in some detail as they are tee. Catalyst co-editor Vivek Chibber, a the main strengths of the journal so far. sociologist based at New York University In the first issue, in Spring 2017, Mike is a DSA supporter. But the journal has Davis gives a prescient, and characteris- attracted people across the wider US left: tically eloquent, analysis of Trump’s vic- Labour Notes founder Kim Moody, Mike tory. He cautions against jumping to con-

68 clusions about embittered, racist white ety as a whole and thereby to understand US workers, arguing that disgust with the what needs to be done to make it better. Democrats among white blue-collar work- We see glimpses of this today. The peo- ers, the effective mobilization of the Rom- ple’s response to homelessness - as seen in ney vote and the religious right provided Ireland earlier this year in Home Sweet the true explanation. His fears about Home - or to the needs of refugees - as Trump emboldening fascists and the alt- in Greece or in Germany - stand in sharp right proved accurate as Charlottesville contrast to the petty and brutal indiffer- showed. Davis argued that the angry ence of national governments. millennial generation, whose bleak future Beyond theorization of the working and deep impoverishment already galva- class, Catalyst’s strength is its com- nized them to follow Sanders, could point pelling descriptions of workers in capi- things in a different direction providing talist production today. The detail of they rebelled against the Democrat estab- some of the articles recall the richness lishment and backed the resistance in the of earlier versions - Braverman, Hinton, streets. Cliff and Barker - which flourished in Davis, extends his analysis, in Cat- the US and the UK in the 1960s and alyst’s second issue, to a more theoret- 70’s. Kim Moody’s ‘The New Terrain of ical discussion of working class agency. Class Struggle’, in Catalyst’s second is- Whereas so many contemporary argu- sue, takes head-on the accepted notion ments on the left stress its fracturing, that manufacturing in the US has de- Davis stakes out the reasons why the clined and led to the marginalization of working class is a revolutionary sub- the working class. He shows that while ject with the qualifications for universal employment has declined manufacturing emancipation. Drawing on many Marxist output increased over the period of 1989- sources, he shows that the working class’s 2007, by 131%, according to Moody’s fig- position in industry, the nature of its eco- ures. Even after the Great Recession, nomic and political chains, its collective jobs have declined, but not overall man- solidarity, its urban experience, its cul- ufacturing output. Moody takes issue tural creativity, its strikes and struggles with the notion that precarious employ- still mark it out for a potentially transfor- ment has irrevocably weakened the work- mational role. He defends the possibility ing class, insisting instead that the de- and necessity of working class politics, en- cisive characteristic of workers today is dorsing Marx’s idea, which rings true for the massive intensification of work im- our wrecked world today, that what is at posed on them. One striking example stake in workers’ struggles against capital that Moody gives is the 2015 contract is the fate of humanity itself. His listing agreement between Ford and the United of the components of potential class con- Auto Workers which grants the company sciousness may err sometimes on the side one minute less in break-time for each of abstraction, and does not stress enough hour worked each day. Ford has 53,000 subjective factors, such as the type of pol- unionized workers and so that amounts to itics available to the working class. Nev- more than 7,000 extra hours work per day ertheless, the article is full of insightful for the entire workforce, and the equiva- gems. Quoting Lukacs, Davis highlights lent of almost four years for the company, the potential of the working class (far at no extra cost. better than the capitalists) to see soci- In the expanding service industries, he

69 argues that class struggle has been re- tory was characterized by intense union- shaped, not eroded, by the re-structuring management battles. Parker’s detail of of work. His argument is that logis- the shop floor shows convincingly how tics clusters are at the center of today’s the Japanese ‘flexible’ system, ‘lean pro- broader production processes, much as duction’, ‘management by stress’, multi- the clusters of auto-assembly plants in skilling, ‘pulling the cord’, etc. is ruth- Detroit or the steel mills in Gary were lessly about driving up profits. He re- in the past. New technology, the logis- minds us, despite the Human Resources tics revolution and greater competition management speak, intense exploitation between capitalist companies has created lurks under the team system, something ‘global supply chain gangs’, whose time- which people in white collar and hi-tech boundedness makes them extremely vul- jobs have come to know as well. nerable to workers action. Despite a Beyond these key debates about work- sharp decline in organized union mem- ers in capitalism, the range and depth of bership and low numbers of strike days, articles in Catalyst articles are impres- recent outbursts of US worker mili- sive. They offer original left-wing ac- tancy amongst teachers, teamsters, tran- counts on subjects as diverse as subal- sit workers, nurses, telecommunications tern studies, the Black Panthers from a workers, public employees, machinists, class perspective, the dynamics of the and railroad workers are proof of a strong Tea Party movement, a new academiciza- wave of rebellion against bureaucratic tion of the ‘culture of poverty’, and im- and corrupt unions. His account is a portant contributions to Marxist debates. strong antidote to the divisive sectional- Charles Post’s review essay of the specific ism peddled by union leaderships. dynamics of commercial plantation slav- The battle between capital and labour ery and its place in the overall develop- and its role in management decisions ment of US capitalism provides a useful within the Ford plants of Detroit is the introduction to what is known as Polit- subject of the article by Joseph Schwarz ical Marxism, a current which Brenner and Joshua Murray. Their view is that and many contributors to the journal are Ford decided to reorganize production, strongly identified with. drop the flexible and highly productive Sometimes, however, it seems that system originally installed by Henry Ford Catalyst sits uneasily between a voice of and relocate plants in order to demobi- the radical left and an academic journal. lize the power that workers had in the Vivek Chibber’s article with the promis- old system, even if this meant seeing ing title of ‘Rescuing Class from the Cul- profits fall and losing out to Japanese tural Turn’ is a case in point. Aim- car makers who managed to skirt round ing to mesh a ‘materialist class analysis’ this capital-labour confrontation. In re- with a cultural analysis to explain ‘class sponse, Mike Parker takes issue with their practice’, Chibber’s method and orienta- underestimation of class struggle within tion severely limits the possibility to ap- the Japanese system. He argues that ply or test his claims. Written for the US capitalists have adopted and imitated academy, it seems unnecessarily abstract, ’Toyotaism’ and, in some cases, gone into relying on diagrams of the interaction of partnership with Japanese companies - culture, class structure and class prac- for example the GM-Toyota plant in Fre- tice rather than on reference to actual mont, California, a plant whose short his- class struggles. This is a pity as Chib-

70 ber is a forceful public speaker and is able posedly done in the public good. The to put across ideas simply and convinc- ANC’s ‘Growth, Equity and Redistribu- ingly, as in for example his contribution to tion’ programme, despite its name, ac- the pamphlet, produced by Jacobin, The tually promoted deficit reduction, tariff ABCs of Socialism which is wonderfully lifting, wage moderation, labour market practical political tool. flexibilization, tax reforms for ‘interna- Dylan Riley, a sociologist at UC tional competitiveness’ - all the things Berkeley, manages to take on academic which actively worked to demobilize the argument in a more accessible way. His movement that had brought it to power. exposure, in the second issue, of Bour- Yet while resistance against these attacks dieu’s erasure of class is a real breath has been determined - as shown by the of fresh air because so often in universi- bravery of the Marikana miners in 2012 ties Bourdieu is taken uncritically. Riley - no political organisation has emerged strips Bourdieu’s notion of habitus down to take the struggle forward. The mili- to its weakness -that it is presented as an tant mining union NUMSA and a break- indicator of class rather than an outcome away from the ANC, the Economic Free- of it, a tautological claim that allows dom Fighters (EEF), beset by bureau- Bourdieu sidestep political economy. Ri- cratic leaderships and opportunistic elec- ley exposes, with devastating clarity, how toral alliances with the neoliberal oppo- the logic of Bourdieu’s sociology manages sition, have both damaged their chances to focus on a range of capitals (cultural, of providing leadership to the movment. symbolic, linguistic) but not on capital- Meanwhile a strong student movement ism itself. Bourdieu’s distance from the over fees and the legacies of racist colo- workings of class within capitalism re- nialism has emerged on university cam- sults in depriving history of its driving puses which the authors argue present op- force. Riley recognizes Bourdieu’s im- portunities for an organization to unite pressive anti-neoliberal political activism, workers and student struggles against the but claims that Bourdieu resonates with corrupt regime. academics for an entirely different reason With respect to Ireland, Catalyst’s - providing the academic with an elevated contribution is less illuminating. New social role, or ‘an honourable perch as the Left Review contributor Daniel Finn, in modest sage of the good society’. his article ‘Irish Politics Since the Crash’ Finally, following in Jacobin’s foot- offers a rather standard account of the steps, Catalyst wants to include interna- economic and political crisis in Ireland tional perspectives. In the second issue, it whose contours he draws mainly from carries a very comprehensive socialist as- the mainstream media and their com- sessment of South Africa After the ANC mentators. While Finn accepts that po- by Sam Ashman and Zachary Levinson litical life on the island will have been and Trevor Ngwane which brings out the ‘transformed to an extent that seemed shocking limits of nationalist parties in inconceivable before the crash’, there is power. The ANC, strongly supported little political analysis of the forces at by the South African Communist Party, play. Labour’s pro-austerity policies in has presided over a society with one of government is judged a tactical mistake; the highest level of poverty in the world Sinn Féin’s duplicity (pro-austerity in while flagrantly lining the pockets of its Northern Ireland and anti-austerity in ministers with payments from deals sup- the South) is seen merely as deft ma-

71 noeuvring; and the growth of the rad- racism on the streets and those on cam- ical left not really explained at all, ex- puses, of discussing tactics of the move- cept to imply that its growth will be lim- ments against Trump, all this has not yet ited. Recognition is given to the impact surfaced in the journal. Moody briefly of the water charges movement but the mentions an ‘alt-labour’ conference orga- author shows little familiarity with the nized by Labour Notes in Chicago last debates that went on within the biggest year, which gathered two thousand ac- and longest mass movement seen in Ire- tivists from the ‘militant minority’ in land for decades. Readers of this jour- the unions along with immigrant rights’ nal will be able to fill in the gaps, but groups workers centres and other com- Finn’s rather removed ’bird’s eye’ view of munity representatives. But the diffi- politics shows something of the random- cult question of how to build outside the ness of Catalyst’s international points of umbrella of the Democratic Party is not contact. Hopefully Catalyst’s publisher, broached at all in Catalyst as yet. Per- Baskar Sunkara will have the opportu- haps this is because of the influence of the nities to hear alternative interpretations DSA which, not a political party itself, when he visits Dublin to speak the Marx- sees its role as a ‘radicalizing democratiz- ism 2017 event at the end of November. ing force for all areas of life’ which can in- More generally, it has to be said that clude the Democratic Party. It would be Catalyst has not so far prioritized detailed useful to have more discussion of political discussion of strategy, despite its stated strategy in future issues of Catalyst, to aim to do so. Pressing strategic ques- ensure that the journal goes beyond ex- tions in the US, of linking working class cellent articles to providing a platform to struggles to existing movements, of possi- build something more lasting. ble cross-overs between struggles against

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