What the heck is Cultural Marxism? (2024)

Wojak Karl Marx

From the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

You may have seen it on a clumsy wojak speech bubble via a Facebook group or on Twitter, more than likely in a 4chan meme, but the buzz phrase ‘Cultural Marxism’ has entered the political lexicon. A term rooted in the theoretical work of the Frankfurt School, which sought to apply Marxist theory to culture, it has also been appropriated to denote a sinister conspiracy theory. That is to say, it initially referred to Marxist critiques of culture but has been adopted by some right-wing and far-right groups to describe perceived threats from progressive social reforms. Members of the Jewish community and anti-racist groups hold that using this term perpetuated antisemitic conspiracy theories.

In 2019 the Guardian, referring to Suella Braverman, reported ‘Tory MP Criticized for Using Antisemitic Term “Cultural Marxism”.’ Other Tory MPs have been criticised for this including the Croydon South MP and multi-millionaire landlord Chris Philp (tinyurl.com/skkrr33e). Somehow he retained his seat in this constituency that has large parts among the country’s lowest twenty percent deprived areas.

This portrayal of Marxism is a misrepresentation that conflates a broad and complex set of ideas into a monolithic threat. As a party with a strong basis in Marx’s actual writings, we can easily dismiss this definition as not only inherently incorrect but also because the term serves not as analysis but as a dog whistle for any type of racist, misogynist or bigoted behaviour.

In politics, a dog whistle is the use of coded or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition or for avoidance of true understanding. Much like ‘woke mind virus’ and ‘social justice warrior’, what ‘Cultural Marxism’ means isn’t as important as who it is being used against and who’s listening.

Cultural Marxism 1.0

‘Cultural Marxism’ initially referred to the work of the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist theorists established in the 20th century, intellectuals like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, who aimed to expand on Marx’s work by applying Marxism to cultural and social phenomena. The goal was to understand why capitalist societies had not yet collapsed despite the inherent contradictions that Marx had drawn attention to.

The Frankfurt School theorists argued that culture, ideology, and mass media play significant roles in maintaining the status quo by shaping public consciousness and discouraging revolutionary thought. They explored concepts such as the ‘culture industry,’ which describes how popular culture is mass produced to reinforce consumerism and passive acceptance of the capitalist system. These ideas were not about destroying ‘First World culture’ but about critiquing how cultural forms are manipulated to maintain the capitalist dominance.

Gramsci contributed to this school of thought with his concept of ‘cultural hegemony’. He posited that the capitalist class maintains control not just through force or economic power, but by dominating cultural norms and values, peddling the capitalist worldview as common sense. This notion emphasized the need for a counter-hegemonic culture to challenge and replace the dominant capitalist ideology with socialist ideas.

Appropriation and distortion by the far-right

In the cold dead claws of the alt-right, Cultural Marxism loses its meaning as a critical theory and is presented as a pejorative term engineered to invoke the conspiracy theory that Marxists are covertly campaigning to subvert ‘White’ culture by accepting the value of equality between race, genders and sexuality. The distorted view accuses these socially progressive changes as part of a coordinated effort to destroy ‘White’ culture. Popping another red pill and through fash-tainted glasses, this conspiracy theory goes on that Cultural Marxists are waging a war against traditional and Christian values to weaken the West from within. This reframing is a gift to the alt-right fash, reformed to paint itself as the victim of a red terror and saviour of Western civilization against a perceived cultural invasion.

The alt-rights use of ‘Cultural Marxism’ as a catch-all term for everything it opposes — feminist, multiculturalist, LGBTQ+, atheists, even the vegans — serves to rally the right and reactionaries against imaginary bogeymen (but usually minorities) and anyone really. This approach allows them to cosplay as the last line of defence against an existential cultural threat. As Slavoj Žižek noted in The Sublime Object of Ideology, ‘The more we discuss the impact of political correctness, the more we lose sight of the actual economic struggles’. This diversion helps the alt-right avoid engaging with tangible issues of capitalist exploitation and economic hardship and racial inequality. Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism added ‘The conspiracy theory of “Cultural Marxism” is an attempt to reduce complex social phenomena into simplistic and unfounded narratives.’

Let’s make sense of the frothing-at-the-mouth rhetoric.

From a socialist perspective the appropriation of Cultural Marxism is a deliberate calculated distraction from hardships and truths facing workers. By focusing on cultural battles it serves the interests of the ruling class by preventing the working class from recognizing its own power. Meanwhile, the capitalist class continues to exploit labour, accumulate wealth, and consolidate power, largely unchallenged by a fragmented and tired populace.

Rosa Luxemburg argued that ‘the most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening’. Thus we argue that the real struggle is not over culture or identity but over who controls the wealth generated by the working class. The focus should not be on fighting imaginary cultural enemies of fictional conspiracies but on the working class organizing to liquidate the capitalist system that exploits them.

This alt-right myth is a convenient albeit dangerous tool for the ruling class to attack the working class, keeping us divided and distracted. By promoting fear of cultural change, the capitalist class can avoid accountability for the economic exploitation and inequality that capitalism perpetuates.

Who smears wins

The tactics used by the alt-right in promoting the Cultural Marxism narrative is a direct lift from the 20th century fascist propaganda tactic of scapegoating with fear-mongering. Smears and vitriol, less blood and soil, more shite and bile. Fascist states thrived on dread and fear of the external enemy — whether it be other nations, communists, a minority, or immigrants — this all served to unify their base and justify extreme political violence. By positioning themselves as defenders of traditional ‘White’ values against a supposed cultural onslaught of the unknowable hordes and heathens, they seek to rally disaffected individuals around a nationalist identity and exclusionary vision.

In The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism in Europe, Paul Hanebrink, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, points out that ‘for much of the twentieth century, Europe was haunted by a threat of Judeo-Bolshevism myth’. He examines the unfounded and damaging narrative that falsely connects Judaism with Bolshevism. This myth emerged in early 20th century Europe and falsely claimed that Jewish people were behind the rise of Russian ‘communism’. The conspiracy theory was employed as a propaganda tool to justify antisemitic policies and actions, contributing to the persecution of Jewish communities and supporting authoritarian regimes. He underscores the myth’s impact on European politics and society, demonstrating how such harmful narratives can distort public perception and fuel discrimination.

Fascism relies on an us-versus-them mentality, which is why the alt-right’s use of ‘Cultural Marxism’ as a bogeyman is so effective. It allows them to present themselves as the last line of defence against a cultural apocalypse, even as they promote intolerance, exclusion, and violence. As political theorist Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, ‘The essence of totalitarianism is not merely a system of government but a state of mind that relies on fear and hate to unite and control’. The alt-right’s approach is not new; it’s a recycled form of demagoguery used to maintain control through division and fear.

This approach ultimately serves the interests of the capitalist class as by promoting cultural conflict, it enables them to continue to exploit labour and amass wealth without facing unity of resistance.

Socialism offers a world where the wealth we create together is used to meet our needs, not to enrich a privileged few. It’s about a future society where we work cooperatively, where resources are shared equitably.

Socialists have a clear-eyed understanding of the challenge we face and reject the false narratives peddled by the alt-right, other bad faith actors and their allies. It’s essential to recognize that the real struggle is not over culture but over economic power and control. By dismantling the capitalist system, we create a society where cultural diversity is celebrated and where all people have the opportunity to participate fully in shaping the world around them.

A. T.

Lenin was wrong, Marx was right (2024)

Book Review from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the 125 years or so since the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, the Socialist Standard has published numerous articles about that event and its acknowledged leader, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin). The view those articles have taken is that what Lenin and the Bolsheviks did in 1917 and after, despite their claim to be following Marxist ideas, ran entirely counter to Marx’s advocacy of a democratically run, marketless, socialist society based on production for use not profit and on the idea of from each according to ability to each according to need. Instead, Lenin set up a tyrannical one-party regime run by and in the interests of a small group of bureaucrats with the market mechanism still operating even if commanded by the state, amounting to a form of capitalism – state capitalism. Furthermore Lenin’s – and then Stalin’s – Russia failed Marx’s ‘test’ for socialism (or communism – he used the two words synonymously), which was that such a society had to – could only – arise from advanced capitalism, not from what existed in Russia in the early 20th century, ie, an economically underdeveloped, largely agricultural society in which capitalism had barely begun to take hold. It could not possibly ‘jump’ the capitalist stage and somehow go straight to socialism – something in fact that Lenin, from his speeches and writings, showed he knew, even if this did not stop him from claiming to follow Marx and to have the aim of establishing socialism.

Marxism-Leninism?

One of the inevitable outcomes of such claims by Lenin has been that, over the period since these events, the cry has gone up – and continues to from many ill-informed quarters – that Marxism (or socialism) has been tried and failed. Not only, so the story goes, did it preside over unbridled violence and brutality, starvation and other unimaginable horror in the years of ‘war communism’ (1918 to 1922) and show itself to be an entirely undemocratic authoritarian form of society for decades after that. It also, though Lenin himself died in 1924, sowed the seeds for a dictator – Stalin – to take absolute power and establish an authoritarian tyranny in which people were arrested, deported and slaughtered in their thousands at the arbitrary whim of an all-powerful leader.

There have of course also been others – not just writers in the Socialist Standard – who have studied the ideas and events in question closely, seen through these arguments and concluded that the Bolshevik takeover under Lenin and what happened later in the Soviet Union can in no reasonable sense be seen as Marxism or socialism in action. A recent example worth citing is the 2021 book by Steve Paxton, Unlearning Marx. Why the Soviet Failure was a Triumph for Marx, which, by careful analysis of the social and economic situation of Russia in the period leading up to 1917, illustrates ‘the failure of capitalist production to penetrate the lives of the mass of ordinary Russian producers’ and the inevitably premature nature of the seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks ‘in the name of the proletariat’ (June 2022 Standard review). The writer’s conclusion is that, since ‘Marx specifically predicted that projects like the Soviet Union would fail’, such an outcome does not in any way mean that ‘socialism has been tried and found wanting’. Another interesting example arises from the 2005 discussion on Marx on the BBC Radio 4 programme, In Our Time. The presenter, Melvyn Bragg, urged the three participants, all well known as practitioners of political ideas and philosophy though not necessarily as socialists or adherents to Marxist ideas (A.C. Grayling, Gareth Stedman Jones and Francis Wheen), to confirm the ‘received’ wisdom that Lenin’s imposition of revolution from the top down (as well as that of later dictators such as Mao, Pol Pot, etc.) was a reflection of Marx’s ideas. But all three disagreed vehemently. One stated that Marx had become a ‘magical name’ that people liked to quote but whose ideas had been distorted by figures such as Lenin, who in fact had ‘turned Marx on his head’. Another said that others ‘took, adapted and twisted him’. The third participant was even more robust in stating that what happened in Russia (and later elsewhere) ‘vindicated Marx’s point’, ie, that revolution imposed from above by ‘heroes on horseback’ inevitably ‘leads to a police state’ and so was ‘a negation of everything he [Marx] stood for and argued for’. In this light the association implicit in the claim to be ‘Marxist-Leninist’ often made by those on the left can be seen as a stark contradiction in terms. This also receives confirmation from parts of Lenin’s own speeches and writings of 1921-22, in which, with Russia in a piteous state after the mass violence, destruction and brutality of its civil war, he admitted defeat by stating ‘our attempt to implement socialism here and now has failed’ and talked about the need ‘to fall back on state capitalism in many economic spheres’.

Lenin in context

Of course, there are those who find value and relevance in Marx’s ideas but are not necessarily averse to their ‘adaptation’ by later political figures such as Lenin who claim Marxist inspiration. An example of this is to be found in the recent book by the American left-wing academic, Paul Le Blanc (Lenin, Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution. Pluto Press, 2023). The key to the association Le Blanc is prepared to make between Lenin and Marx is to be found in the title: ‘Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution’. Implicit in this is the idea, often repeated in the pages of an invigoratingly written book that sweeps us informatively through the whole of Lenin’s personal and political life, that the Bolshevik leader, while following in Marx’s footsteps, had to adapt and respond to the circumstances he and Russia found themselves in at the time, to be ‘flexible’ (a frequently used word). Hence Lenin’s work becomes a kind of Marxism in action, ‘open, critical-minded’, adapted to ‘a particular historical situation’ and conditioned by ‘interactions with others’. In support of this, the author quotes a reference by Lenin to the words of Marx and Engels that ‘our theory is not a dogma but a guide to action’. So, according to Le Blanc, Lenin, while sharing and aiming for Marx’s fundamental goal of a free, classless, stateless society, found himself having to deal with ‘living realities and actual struggles, not abstract revolutionary “correctness”’. In this light, therefore, according to the author, far from the ‘architect of totalitarianism’ Lenin is often presented as by conservative commentators, he was rather a leader ready to face the twists and turns of a reality that was ‘complex, ever-changing and contradictory’ and to take action accordingly – the justification for which Lenin himself framed as the application of ‘revolutionary dialectics’.

Yet Le Blanc is not always or unequivocally ready to accept such justification, and it would be unfair to characterise his study as some kind of uncritical rehabilitation of Lenin. It is, however, difficult not to sense a ‘benefit of the doubt’ tendency and this throws up a number of seeming contradictions in the way Lenin’s thought and actions are presented – the author seeming on occasion to want it both (or all) ways. So, while keen to present Lenin as a Marxist in action striving for socialism, he also states (realistically as pointed to by the evidence) that Lenin saw ‘the upcoming revolution’ as ‘not a transition to socialism, but a transition to a capitalist social and political order’. Again he refers to Lenin’s understanding of nationalism as a ‘secular faith’ and ‘the great rival of socialism’, while at the same time pointing to a view he expressed that ‘there were different forms of nationalism – some worthy of support, others worthy of denunciation’. He refers with brutal frankness to the ‘emergency measures’ taken by Lenin’s ‘new Communist regime’ in the period of Russia’s civil war (‘one-party dictatorship’, ‘Red Terror’, ‘persecution of party dissidents’) and the ‘repressive bureaucratic dictatorship’ that came after, yet this does not prevent him from describing the early years of the ‘Communist International’ which Lenin was closely associated with as demonstrating ‘heroic and impressive qualities, crackling with insights’.

Even-handed?

All this could of course simply be regarded as a form of ‘even-handedness’ on the part of the author, and so entirely positive. But it could also perhaps be understood by reference to the phenomenon of ‘cognitive dissonance’ which Le Blanc himself spends a paragraph explaining. Under this dynamic, confronted with evidence that conflicts with our well-established worldview, we experience an uncomfortable mental conflict which tends to make us dismiss that evidence and simply carry on as before. Examples he gives of this are people currently denying ‘the documented reality of climate change’ and others ‘not wanting to acknowledge the horrific realities associated with the Stalin regime’. So, in the case of this author’s take on Lenin, while himself presenting evidence of the ‘horrific realities’ he presided over and what most people would regard as outright distortions (not just ‘adaptations’) of Marx, we have an ongoing attachment to the man, the Bolshevik takeover and the overall claim that Lenin’s ideas seem more relevant than ever now.

Of course, even if the Socialist Party will see this as a serious blind spot in the author’s analysis of the historical struggle for a socialist society from Marx onwards, there is much in his book that socialists would accept and agree with. We would not, for example, want to challenge the author’s brilliantly incisive description of modern capitalism (‘a voracious market economy designed to enrich already immensely wealthy elites … intimately connected with environmental destruction engulfing our world’) or his clear characterisation of class society in capitalism ‘(the working class is those who make a living (get enough money to buy basic necessities and perhaps some luxuries) by selling their ability to work (their labor-power) to an employer. Out of the labor-power, the employer squeezes actual labor in order to create the wealth that is partly given to the workers (usually as little as possible), with the rest of this labor-created wealth going to the employer)’. On the other hand, we would see as misguided various of the ‘remedies’ for this often heard on the Leninist or Trotskyist Left which the author seems to quote with approval, for example the need for workers to have the correct ‘leadership’ for a new society to be established and ‘experiences of struggle that will convince working people of the inevitability of revolution and the significance of communism’. We would also challenge that other commonly held left-wing perspective found in this book of ‘Lenin good, Stalin bad’ (ie, that there was no continuity between the two), though we would heartily agree with one commentator’s view noted here that ‘Stalinism was as different from socialism as the hippopotamus from the giraffe’.

Right or wrong?

So was Lenin a Marxist (or a socialist)? Perhaps in the end what Paul Le Blanc’s eminently readable book can be taken as saying is that he would have liked to be and considered himself one but that circumstances prevented it. But wasn’t that what, if you were a Marxist, you should have known was bound to happen, since Marx saw socialism as arising from advanced capitalist development not from the chronically underdeveloped society that was early twentieth century Russia?

Howard Moss

Should ‘we’ consume less? (2024)

From the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his recently published book Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth, Kohei Saito contends that:

‘Almost every one of us living in a developed country belongs to the world’s richest 20 percent’ and that our exploitative ‘imperial mode of living’ allows us enjoy an ‘extravagant lifestyle’ at the expense of workers in the Global South – an echo of the discredited Leninist theory of the ‘labour aristocracy’.

Moreover, suggests Saito, it is ‘we’ who are ‘coddled by the invisibility of our lifestyle’s costs’ who inflict far more damage on the environment than do they – our fellow workers on the other side of the planet. ‘We’ will ‘not be able to truly combat climate change if we all fail to participate, as directly interested parties, in the radical transformation of the Imperial Mode of Living’. That means disengaging, starting now under capitalism, from consumer culture ‘while also reducing the volume of everything we consume’. At the end of the day there seems to be little here to distinguish Saito from what the de-growth eco-pessimists have to say, apart from his invocation of ‘communism’.

Matt Huber and Leigh Phillips make a valid point in their review of Saito’s book:

"Saito also sees this primarily not as a battle between classes of workers and capitalists, but global regions: “the injustice of socially vulnerable people in the Global South countries bearing the brunt of climate change although the carbon dioxide was emitted, for the most part, by the Global North, which brought on this disaster.”

When it comes to who in the Global North is responsible, Saito is more liable to point at himself and other workers than capital: “Our rich lifestyles would be impossible without the plundered natural resources and exploited labor power of the Global South”’ (Jacobin, 9 March 2024,).

Was Marx productivist?

Saito also claims that, as far as Marx was concerned, there was an ‘epistemological break’ in the latter´s writings that began sometimes during the 1860s.

This epistemological break has been characterised as representing a move away from a ‘“linear, progressive view” of history, marked by “productivism” and “Eurocentrism”, and towards a new vision of communism’. Saito does at least accept that ‘communism’ means a moneyless, wageless, classless and stateless alternative to capitalism which is based on the twin principles of free access to socially produced wealth and voluntaristic labour as the basis of wealth production.

In short Marx, according to Saito, abandoned historical materialism and the acceptance of capitalist technological progress in favour of ‘de-growth communism’ in which the needs of the population would be catered for within clear limits imposed by nature itself.

Marx did indeed acknowledge the necessity and importance of capitalist technological progress in preparing the ground for a future communist society, but his standpoint cannot plausibly be called a ‘productivist’ one. There are many passages in the early writings of both Marx and Engels that suggest a deep concern with the environmental impact of economic growth and are hardly compatible with the kind of Promethean or productivist outlook sometimes attributed to them. Their assessment of capitalist technological advancement as being ‘progressive’ was contingent inasmuch as it suggests there will come a point when it could no longer be characterised as such. At this point it would become redundant or even reactionary as a mode of production.

Limits to lifestyle changes

You cannot expect capitalism to gradually disappear through the incremental accumulation of minor adjustments to the way we live and do things. The whole system is fundamentally held together and underpinned by the brute fact of minority ownership and control of the means of wealth production and the consequent alienation of the great majority from these means. It is only when the latter take matters in hand and seek to democratically bring about fundamental change from the bottom up that capitalism will finally disappear.

We cannot hope to bring about the fundamental change required through mere lifestyle changes within the framework of existing capitalist society. This is not meant to discourage individuals from wanting to make such changes. These could conceivably help even if only in symbolic, more than practical, terms. But the basic problem we face as a society is not really the result of individuals somehow having made the wrong lifestyle choice.

Saito is not entirely wrong, however. ‘Lifestyle choices’ matter up to a point insofar as they are bound up with the question of social values. After all, a working class, still receptive or responsive to the values that underpin a capitalist consumer ideology, would surely not yet be ready to undertake the transformation of society itself. Their readiness to do that surely presupposes a transformed worldview on their part. In other words, a shift in values.

It is difficult to see how a strategy of, today within capitalism, ‘reducing the volume of everything we consume’ is going to succeed. Reducing consumption means reducing the market demand for the good in question. Normally, the response of businesses in these circumstances would be to reduce the price of this good. In other words, to reboot or stimulate market demand.

You as one individual might indeed have the strength of will and moral resolve to resist the lure of a bargain offer but there is nothing to say that your neighbour will follow suit. This is the problem with the system; it has the uncanny knack of being able to pick us off one by one so long as we confine our thinking to its conceptual parameters.

We cannot buck the market while we live in a market economy. It is this that sets limits on what we can achieve by way of lifestyle changes. Only by eliminating capitalism will we be in a position to adapt how we produce and consume in ways that suit ourselves and our long-term future on this planet.

Robin Cox

Missing revolution (2024)

Book Review from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard 

If We Burn. The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. By Vincent Bevins. Wildfire, 2023. 336pp.

The years 2010 to 2020 saw a possible record number of protest movements over a single decade in different parts of the globe. In many places change of one kind or another was being sought. This book chronicles and seeks to make sense of many of the movements in that ‘mass protest decade’. These include protests that took place in the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ countries (Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen), in Latin America (Brazil, Chile), in Hong Kong, South Korea, Ukraine and Turkey, and also, if fleetingly, in Algeria, Bolivia, Syria and Libya as well as via the Occupy Wall Street movement. What is found by the author as a common feature of almost all of them is that they ‘failed’, in the sense that the activists didn’t get what they wanted and in some instances (eg, Egypt, Brazil, Hong Kong) unleashed outcomes that were worse than what existed before. The author’s detailed knowledge of these events arises from his actually being present on the ground in some countries in his role as a foreign journalist for an American newspaper (The Los Angeles Times) but also of multiple personal interviews conducted later in many countries with key protagonists of the happenings in question. This result is a wickedly intricate account that takes us fascinatingly close to the lived experience of those directly involved.

In searching for answers to the failures he catalogues, the factors the author tends to see as most important are faulty methods of organisations and too much ‘horizontalism’ (ie, lack of hierarchical leadership). But, despite the grasp he has of the social and historical background of the territories in question, both through research and personal experience, and his presence on the ground in some of them, this book suffers from a failure on the part of the author to get to the bottom of the underlying nature of and reasons for these protests. He seems determined to frame them as attempts at fundamental social change, even revolution, on the part of those involved, yet if examined closely, a better explanation for the protests and the street demonstrations is a far less radical one. They are largely attempts by people feeling oppressed, disadvantaged or outraged by one aspect or another of how their society is run to try and push those who govern into ways of managing the system they live under more benignly, more ‘fairly’. But key is the reality that they are looking for that system – capitalism – to be reformed, not overthrown.

Throughout the history of capitalism, in different parts of the world, such protests seeking piecemeal changes have come and gone and will continue to do so, sometimes achieving small improvements but, inevitably, failing to change the basic nature of the system we live under. Their precise targets vary, but what unites them is that they involve tinkering at the edges of the ongoing problems and crises that capitalism throws up. Above all, they do not stem from a consciousness that the buying and selling system needs to be replaced by a different one of voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services – which we would call socialism. So the decade of false dawns the author delves into here is only actually part of a century or more of similar campaigns aimed at trying to make capitalism work in ways that run counter to its needs and its nature.

A further reservation this reviewer would have is the author’s ‘sloppy’ use of the words ‘socialism’ and ‘socialist’, employed as a kind of catch-all to mean either some form of state capitalism or any kind of protest or revolt looking to reform certain aspects of capitalism — to make the lives of workers, the majority class, more liveable within it. So we are told, for example that: the Students for a Democratic Society movement in the US in the 1960s ‘advocated for a more socialist economy’; the fall of the Soviet union led to ‘the rapid collapse of allied socialist states’; Tunisia had taken on ‘elements of Nasser’s socialist model’ and was not the same since ‘the end of Arab Socialism’; and in Hong Kong ‘the movement contained elements that … defended aspects of the old socialist system’.

Despite this, there are moments in this book where the author does show a clear understanding of the system we are up against, one whose purpose, in his own words, is ‘to make all the world’s states porous to international capital and open up all the planet’s resources for extraction and commodification’. And he does also come close to glimpsing the kind of world marketless, leaderless society that would transcend the kinds of problems, constantly and inevitably thrown up by capitalism, that the protests examined here focus on. That glimpse can be found, for example, when he talks about ‘constructing a movement that can stand the test of time, in addition to remaining democratic and accountable’ and ‘a world when artificial distinctions and narrowly self-interested activities melt away’ and … ‘our society truly is participatory’.

Howard Moss