Gavin Smith Page 1

Against social democratic angst about revolution:

from failed citizens to critical praxis

Gavin Smith

[M]uchos pensadores consideran que la izquierda debe centrarse en la

construcción de un modelo de capitalismo posliberal. Esta idea…
supone que ser de izquierda es ser posliberal, que ser de izquierda es
bregar por un capitalismo organizado, humano, productivo. Esta idea
socava a la izquierda desde hace varios años, porque ser de izquierda
es luchar contra el capitalismo. Me parece que es el abecé. Ser
socialista es bregar por un mundo comunista. En cada etapa ese
horizonte cambia y los parámetros estratégicos se renuevan.1 –
Claudio Katz Dec 2015 (Itals added)

We seem to be stuck between an accurate assessment of what Gramsci would call an

organic crisis whose multiplying features we can now see are becoming obvious to
ever more people by the day (from ‘financial crisis’, to ‘climate change’, to
‘corruption’ and ‘surveillance’), and a surge of books, articles and even television
appearances2 that speak of revolution which have appeared over the past couple of
years by people who are not normally associated with active radical left politics.3
There is no doubt that these interventions, whether they be complicated reflections on,
for example the ethics of violence, or public provocations on the popular media, are a
reflection of the fact, as Gramsci once remarked, “that the old is dying and the new
cannot be born” and all in all are probably a good thing. But their mongrel pedigree
means that the meanings evoked are quite different from their usage when
revolutionary political practice required greater precision. So both nineties Eastern
Europe and the Arab Spring are referred to as revolutions, as is the emergence of
figures like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.
The effect on me as a reader is not to exercise a kind of ageist superiority of
knowledge, but rather to want to go back and reassess what we discussed with such

1
“Many thinkers are of the view that the left should focus on building a model of post-
liberal capitalism. This … assumes that being on the left is to be post-liberal, that to be
on the left is to slog away for an organized, human, productive capitalism. This idea has
undermined the left for several years now because being left means fighting capitalism.
To me, this is ABC. To be socialist is to fight for a communist world. At each stage that
horizon changes and the strategic parameters are renewed.” Italics added.
2
If we are to take Russell Brand’s quarrel with Jeremy Paxman as a case in point [BBC News
23/10/13. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YR4CseY9pk]
3
“As paradoxical as it may seem, at the very moment when the prospects for a revival of radical
politics appear especially bleak,” remark Manza and McCarthy (2011) with scarcely disguised glee,
“Developing blueprints for new kinds of utopian ideas for socialist transition have been a remarkably
brisk undertaking in recent years, strangely enough often emanating from North America where real
socialism (or social democracy) is furthest from the political agenda.” [In view of the fact that a social
democratic party was actually the official opposition in Canada at the time they were writing, perhaps
we should conclude that, unsurprisingly for these two members of NYU’s sociology department,
‘North America’ means the U.S.]
Gavin Smith Page 2

ease and so little effect in that past era. So the task I want to set myself in this paper is
to reflect on how a commitment to revolutionary politics might require a different set
of concepts than those to which we have recently become accustomed, the goal being
no more than to clarify what is involved in thinking along these lines today.
The position from which I start is that there are two questions of primary concern
for these kinds of politics. One is that the insurrectionary or emancipatory politics that
precede revolutions are always multiple, various and messy so that a crucial
revolutionary element is the moment of combination and how it is done. To tackle this
I use the lens of Uneven and Combined Development (henceforth UCD). This leads
me to revisit understandings of resistance and citizenship preliminary to a discussion
of revolution. There is then a second question which has to do with a decisive point as
the revolutionary regime takes power against counter-revolutionary forces when the
tension between the party and the movement[s] must be taken into account – though
not necessarily resolved. Again, I suggest that UCD is helpful for our understanding
especially through different possibilities for dual power. I conclude by speculating
that the volatility and insecurity of certain sectors of the population is closer to the
figure of the potential resistant than that of the failed citizen.

Uneven and Combined Development

Cowen and Shenton (1996) make the point that the term ‘development’ at least
since the late 19th century has been used in a contradictory manner, since the process
of capital reproduction is itself taken to be development albeit perhaps in a rather
Darwinian sense, while development programmes were supposed to be about
stewardship, a domineering enterprise too, but of a different kind. The fact of uneven
development whether geographical or sociological so drove this latter meaning that
the qualifier was really unnecessary. Cowen and Shenton’s distinction is more or less
assumed by Neil Smith in his book of that title (1984). Noting that he wants to engage
in a dialogue between the analysis derived in the 19th century and “the reality of
capitalism toward the close of the 20th century,” he makes clear that “Uneven
development, in the strict sense implied in this work, is a truly twentieth-century
phenomenon.” (ibid: 6).
As we will find throughout this paper there is a perpetual difference in the
assumptions underlying terms used simultaneously by progressive liberals on the one
hand (broadly speaking what I call social democrats here) and what once was called
the revolutionary left on the other. So through the eyes of an I.M. Lewis (1955) or a
W.W. Rostow (1960) capitalism was not the problem that produced uneven
development, uneven development was a problem for capitalism – which capitalism
could readily solve. By contrast those who took uneven development to be a question
of unequal exchange between centre and periphery (Franck, Wallerstein) together
with those who spoke in terms of the articulation of modes of production (Rey,
Meillassoux, Godelier, Kahn) took the view that capitalist development worked
through and across unevenness, while Harvey (1982) and Smith then demonstrated
precisely how this was so essential for the reproduction of capital and so tightly tied
to its political-economic logic.
Gavin Smith Page 3

Perhaps some of these writers took for granted the fact that the unevenness of
development was also combined but if so they did not tie the one element to the other.
In this their contributions are more in line with Lenin’s understanding of unevenness
especially as he took up his argument with Kautsky in the Imperialism pamphlet
(Lenin, 1960). There the issue of combination does indeed arise and is central to his
disagreements with both Kautsky and Hilferding, but the meaning the three give to
the term refers to industrial cartels and the possibility of similarly formed national
cartels.4 In this discussion, by contrast, combination is understood differently: what
was combined with uneven development was not just the combination in the present
of unevenly developed spatial and social phenomena, but an understanding of
unevenness as combining – interlacing, articulating – an entire panoply of social and
cultural realities.5
Uneven and combined development then, by no means refers strictly to
economic sophistication, geographical distinction, or even sociological unevenness.
Rather it is an attempt to find a means to respect the historical and contemporary
intricacy of socio-cultural forms in the process of their combination. This “law of
history” (Trotsky, 1960), is undoubtedly a result of a past of domestic and imperial
domination and exploitation. But for current political purposes combination as a
current condition of reality is the challenge presented to us by the organic crisis (the
term is Gramsci’s). In view of the fact that we live in what Natalie Melas (2014) calls
a kind of “terminal presentism – the culmination of a failed teleology,” making the
notion useful for these purposes means compensating for the unavoidable fact that
Trotsky used UCD in the context of his firm belief in an a priori logic of history
unfolding toward revolution.6
Combination means the “drawing together of the different stages of the journey,
a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary
forms.” (Trotsky, 1957: 4)
The challenge then, becomes one of retaining UCD while seeing it in terms of a more
open-ended history, yet nonetheless geared toward a revolutionary outcome, so that

4
Referring to it as ‘ultra-imperialism’ Kautsky (along with Hilferding) took the view that under
conditions of large capitalist cartels it would be in the interests of capital in general to reduce
unevenness. Lenin, by contrast, argued that the interests of specific capitals would always prevail over
‘capital in general’ and unevenness would result. “Kautsky’s utterly meaningless talk about ultra-
imperialism encourages, among other things, that profoundly mistaken idea which only brings grist to
the mill of apologists of imperialism, viz. that the rule of finance capital lessens the unevenness and
contradictions inherent in world economy, whereas in reality it increases them.” (Lenin, 1960:35) (See
inter alia: Holloway, 1983; Davidson, 2012a). It was in part Hilferding’s and Kautsky’s optimism
about late capitalism’s natural forms that inclined them towards the social democratic alternative
practiced in “Red Vienna” from 1918 to 1934, whence Kautsky repaired in 1924 until his death in
1938. This early belief that capitalism had at least some ‘social’ tendencies that made efforts to reform
it preferable to social revolution was the basis for social democracy’s later liberal versions. See
footnote 10.
5
Neil Smith astutely pointed out that for Trotsky unevenness was “a political concept which referred
to the uneven development of class struggle” (ibid: 5. Itals added) But this of course leads us a long
way from uneven temporal and spatial relations understood as entirely the result of the capitalist
economy.
6
…. albeit revolution in his view taking varying forms and complex class formations in its ‘permanent’
version.
Gavin Smith Page 4

“it becomes possible to appreciate plural, uneven, and interwoven processes of social
change.” (Makki, 2015: 489)
It is useful here to remind ourselves of Eric Wolf’s early critique of the
understanding of local ‘culture’ in Mexico. For Wolf the way in which power
manifested itself in particular spheres of social interaction was the outcome of how
they were articulated through history across wider fields of power. And then these
scales of interaction articulated to produce more or less resilient spheres of social
coherence. In his own words, he set out to understand these, “… communities as
outcomes and determinants of historical processes; to visualize these processes as
intimately connected with changes in the wider economic and political field; and to
understand structures as growing out of these involvements over time rather than in
terms of culture content.” (Wolf. 2001: 161. See Smith, 2015).
In a similar manner, in his critique of International Relations (IR) social theory
to account for social and political multiplicity Justin Rosenberg (2006, 2007) has
attacked both Skocpol and Callinicos along similar lines. The argument revolves
around a distinction the former make between [interstate] geopolitics and uneven
capitalist development as relatively autonomous explanations for the international
political economy. (Callinicos and Rosenberg, 2008) By contrast Rosenberg argues
that the historical formation of what now look like states are the heterogeneous
outcomes of UCD. “Rather than viewing societies as preformed discrete entities that
then coexist and interact [cf. Wolf’s critique of prevailing views of ‘cultures’],
Rosenberg invites us to conceive of this process of interaction as itself constitutive of
these social orders.” (Allinson & Anievas, 2009).
Gramsci and Rosenberg, taken together, it seems to me, urge us to understand
the reciprocal constitution of the global field of power that, through UCD, produces
the specificity of heterogeneously formed ‘political societies’ [‘states’, ‘societies’
‘supra-states’] on the one hand, and simultaneously the unevenly combined economic,
social and cultural spheres within specific national social formations. As we move
across scales then, we need to understand these distinct spheres in terms of their
mutually constitutive combination while also acknowledging their own specific
particularisms– that is to say their qualitatively distinctive character vis a vis the
relations of capital.
In The southern question Gramsci famously wrote of these phenomena in
spatial terms. But the way in which we might understand temporal unevenness can be
seen through juxtaposing his reflections on passive revolution with Ernst Bloch’s
controversial notion of the nonsynchronous or noncontemporaneous. (1977; 1991)
For Gramsci in a passive revolution “restoration becomes the first policy whereby
social struggles find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain
power without dramatic upheavals…. [so that] the efforts of the traditional classes…
prevent the formation of collective will.” (Gramsci, 1971: 115) His concern was to
reference bourgeois reformist programmes from above designed to side-line counter-
politics from below, the result being a perpetuation of incomplete popular projects –
in other words, “far more aspirations to social revolution than successful revolutions,”
Gavin Smith Page 5

as Braudel (1976: 735) remarked for the Mediterranean in an earlier period.7 The
result is a landscape of heterogeneity throughout the extended period of an organic
crisis: “[U]neven social temporalities [are] conjuncturally synchronized by a
contingent hegemonic political bloc within a national social formation….” (Makki.
490 ft23. Itals added).
Writing at much the same time but with a focus on northern Europe Bloch
spoke of members of current society whose historical project had been curtailed or
side-tracked making their alienation from capital “non-synchronous” in his words, in
contrast to the directly synchronous relations (of capital/labour) produced by capital
itself. As a result the traces of history were not simply archaic striations carved into a
lost past but elements in the perpetual heterogeneity of the political currents of the
present, understood not as a single conjuncture but rather as – “a series of overlapping
histories developing simultaneously.” (Braudel, ibid: 892) This leads to what we
might call the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous that obliges us “to treat
such phenomena relationally rather than as discrete archaisms.” (Makki, 489-90)
It was to avoid their treatment as ‘archaisms’ that Raymond Williams invoked
the notion of the residual, “…meanings and values which were created in actual
societies or actual situations in the past, and which still seem to have significance
because they represent areas of human experience, aspiration and achievement which
the dominant culture neglects, undervalues, opposes, represses or even cannot
recognize.” (1977:123). He not only stressed the living nature of these phenomena but
their oppositional nature vis a vis dominant culture.
“The residual … is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all
as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present. Thus certain
experiences, meanings, and values which cannot be expressed or substantially
verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on
the basis of the residue – cultural as well as social – of some previous social and
cultural institution or formation. …[T]his aspect of the residual … may have [an]
oppositional relation to the dominant culture.” (ibid, 122. Itals added)
These ways of understanding history and contemporaneity in terms of a
mutually constitutive dialectic of combination offers a challenge to a kind of politics
that relies on carving out an autonomous distinct space from either capitalism or other
‘older’ forms of struggle, an oasis of social relations that ‘prefigures’ a possible
society innocent of the forms of struggle against power necessary to establish it.
(Graeber, 2013) I will return to the question of spaces of alterity vis a vis capital by
reference to the changing fortunes of the idea of ‘autogestion’. Here though we need
to note that the view of the historical present I have provided forces a re-examination
of analyses that have been quite capital-centric and historically unidirectional (Löwy,
1987: 900).
It is not that the same ‘logic of capital’ operates differently from one place to
another, but rather that it is itself differently configured, with correspondingly

7
Revolutionary times being characterized by their aspirational sentiments rather than their political
outcomes is to be found too in Grandin & Joseph’s (2010) A century of revolutions.
Gavin Smith Page 6

distinct effects, across the socially uneven multiplicity of the world. (Makki,
2015: 491)
And it is with a view to suggesting the methodological modifications needed to move
on from this position that I now turn.
The issue for anthropologists is to go beyond Bloch’s tendency to see the
simultaneity of nonsynchronous practices and beliefs only in terms of unfinished
histories or left over traditions; to understand also their socio-spatial dimension in the
actuality of the present. Unlike an older literature (eg. Smith, 1979; 1985) it is not
simply that the kinds of relations and practices we are speaking of here are in part
‘non-commodified’; rather it is that they have pasts too that distinguish their
particular values and concrete practices from the abstractions of capital.8 The
qualitatively distinct nature of these socio-cultural spheres – not just ‘moral
economies’ – as we encounter them in our ethnographic work, need to be respected as
such then. But the qualitative particularity of such relations do not exist autonomously
or in isolation but rather need to be seen as the on-going outcome of their varied
combination across a broader heterogeneous social field.
Moreover, if these conditions are not simply to be seen as a failure of capitalist
penetration or in some other way understood as functional or dysfunctional to capital,
then we as researchers have to live with an uneasy tension. It arises precisely in the
difficulty of working across a threshold between the real particularity and
concreteness of spatial and historical distinctiveness on the one hand – migrants’
affectual networks, the barrio communal councils of Caracas and the like and of the
necessity of their relations to the valuations of capital – wages, commodities, credit
and so on. I contend, then that the fields of force of capitals and of the state produce
thresholds of confusion but also of refusal. This generates heterogeneous
subjectivities so that within these kinds of arenas open-ended debate gives rise to
albeit limited, immediate tactical responses or possibly longer term political
strategies.
Yet, if this is so, then surely this is not the figure captured in the term ‘citizen’
residing in a metaphorical space called ‘civil society’? As increasing numbers in the
global north fit very uneasily into a society described as ‘civil’ and thus join those
long already familiar to us in the south, conditional adjectives become uneasy prefixes
to the otherwise liberal notion of the citizen: cultural citizens, precarious citizens,
marginal citizens and so on. Seen in our accounts as self-governing subjects
overwhelmed by the supposed success of hegemonic projects gathered under the
rubric ‘neoliberalism’, these figures are less agents with a potential for praxis than
mere effects of the state. Dominant forces don’t just condition the possibilities for
their politics but, in this kind of accounting, render their subjectivities in terms of
aimless victims marginal to the currents of history.
To suggest an alternative can only be provisional – for the purpose of twisting
the lens of familiarity, to see the world differently – perhaps not so much in the
interests of analytic balance and coherence but simply by way of provocation. For

8
See for example Harootunian’s (2015) use of Marx’s ‘formal subsumption’.
Gavin Smith Page 7

this reason I wish to cast against the ubiquity of the worker-citizen in or on the edge
of civil society, that of the worker who, perpetually at risk, needs each day to (re-)
produce the occluded and volatile associational life that makes livelihood possible – a
world in other words of the resistant: hence the worker-resistant.9 The setting for the
ideal of integration that frames the figure of the citizen is more or less taken-for-
granted, but here I need to provide the setting for the ideal of this much more
problematic figure of the partisan.

Resistance
We need to begin by recognizing the profound political ambivalence of the
notion of resistance when decoupled from socialist revolution. Far from being a
moment of political action it is understood as an attitude, one that in current
discussions provides the redemptive morality check on what would otherwise be the
utter moral bankruptcy of liberal citizenship. So this residue of resistance – in
Camus’s (1951) version its perpetual remaining as such – simultaneously critiques
instituted power and is indispensable to it. Such an interpretation of resistance offers a
moral lifeline to liberal society and yet as such has an absent future. Resistance
becomes a Sysiphean moral act in perpetuity, “…not a matter of what a citizen must
do to be classed as a good citizen… not causing trouble, but of what a citizen can
do…” (Balibar, 2014: 282)
One way to interpret this is that it is the result of “the seeming waning of the
‘longing for total revolution,” that energizes the writing of David Scott (2014:2). But
seen from the perspective of uneven and combined development it might also be that
‘resistance’ has acquired a great deal more senses and possibilities than it had when
Sherry Ortner (1995) bemoaned its improper usage. Reflecting the multiple histories
and heterogeneous experiences of alienation from the regimentations of capitalist
modernity and the ‘freedoms’ of the liberal state what we might now be witnessing is,
“never a pure moment of resistance, but always a reciprocal play of resistances that
form clusters or sequences of resistance…” (Caygill, 2013: 5). In this social
democratic retreat from revolution, wilful resistance can take on many forms then.10
But once we move away from this liberal agenda to cast the redemptive features
of resistance in terms of the individual against the collective and move instead
towards resistance as itself collective, two rather distinct ways of thinking about it
arise. First there is both a dialectics of the present and residues of the past. There is a
kind of resistance that arises from the immanent dialectics of capital as it grinds on

9
Lefebvre was uneasy with narrow uses of the terms ‘production’ and ‘work’. He preferred a broader
usage to include the production of social relations and “in the fullest sense of the term, reproduction.”
(Quoted in Ronnenberger, 2009: 91). So against the ideal of integration conjured by the worker-citizen
should more properly be posed the appropriator-resistant who actively appropriates their world rather
then being alienated from it. (see ibid)
10
As a result of the complexity of the relationship between revolutionary socialism in Russia and social
democracy in Germany and Austria following the revolution, the latter term covers a wide spectrum of
meanings. In this essay I refer to its liberal socialist inclinations following the migration of the German
SPD in the wake of Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, and then the Cold War version after 1945. The
‘angst’ however did not become acute until social democratic parties embraced neoliberal programmes
in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Gavin Smith Page 8

producing its own negation in labour – politics being the willed expression of internal
contradiction. And there is also the kind of resistance that Bloch sought to capture by
contrasting this ‘synchronous’ politics to ‘nonsynchronicity’ as we have seen above.
This prompts us to ask how collective experiences of different kinds of resistance,
none of which necessarily achieve an identifiable goal11 give rise to specific political
subjectivities. This would appear to be at least partly what Howard Caygill (2013)
does in his On resistance, in which he argues, with the Situationists, that the intensity
of lived experience may be a stronger factor in this regard than ‘consciousness’ or
ideological capacitación.12 From this perspective, counter-revolutionaries aside,
resistants are in many ways the political expression of enduring insecurity and risk
who participate in a spasmodic and often concealed social life fighting revolutions
that are always only provisionally won, returning to the present from perpetually
unrealized futures. Indeed, insofar as the securing of their daily livelihood and the
project of resistance against forces bent on dispossessing them of the means for doing,
so the experience of the resistant and that of the destitute are all but identical.
The fact that negatively resisting and positively putting together a livelihood
can go hand in hand such that the one infuses the other, may of course mean no more
than occasional or more frequent refusals, picaresque gestures, or securing of what
used to be called ‘long pay’.13 But in many cases it does have this common feature –
that the life of the partisan as fighter and the life of the partisan as survivor are such
formative experiences that what was begun as a means toward an end becomes a
learning experience toward the design of the end itself – the formation of resistant
subjectivity. In this respect I have recently argued (Smith, 2016) that the attitude of an
important number of socialist women and men with whom I lived in rural Spain
during the Transition after Franco’s death (1975) was less that of passive victims of
the past than of anger at their betrayal by the political leadership of the left as they
agreed to a pacto de silencio. But this attitude of being resistant arose not just from a
political stance but from the everyday kinds of resistance that were necessary for
livelihood within the estraperlo (black market) of the earlier francoist Spain. 14 There
was a sense that, without a radical change at a broader level this especially savage
kind of capitalism would persist.
A second point arises from something Marx began to reflect upon by reading
about the Russian mir and the Indian village (Anderson, 2010), and that a number of
anthropologists working on emancipatory movements have noted. (See for example
Shah, 2016; Smith, 2014; 2015). While it would be misleading to speak of a kind of
resistance ‘outside’ capitalism,15 nonetheless I believe it heuristically useful to

11
And some of which possibly don’t have very clearly articulated goals at all.
12
This is a distinction sometimes associated with Luxemburg’s view of the role of workers’ experience
during mass strikes versus Lenin’s stress on the importance of class consciousness.
13
In late 18th and early 19th-century Britain apprentices and other workers spoke of ‘long pay’ when, in
lieu of unpaid wages, they carried off bits and pieces of equipment or the finished product itself.
14
Though in a different context this is captured well in an one old French payson’s response to the
query as to how he was getting along, “On resiste, Mademoiselle. On resiste.” (Lem, 1998).
15
To avoid the unwanted imagery of the isolated outside, Sanyal (2007) distinguishes between ‘capital’
that refers only to Bloch’s synchronous relations, and ‘capitalism’ which he uses to embrace also
Gavin Smith Page 9

enquire as to the degree to which a form of resistance begins as a kind of system-

resistance, almost like a bodily rejection (of capital, possibly of the state) which then
provides the very distinctive form in which the more willed and more political
resistance takes.16 I have argued in this respect that there were elements of the social
relations of the huasicanchinos in Peru tying them through affectual ties once across
the altiplano to the market-town of Huancayo and thence to the inner-city slums and
shanty towns of Lima, and now still further to migrants in and around Milan, that
were systemically resistant to the forms of ‘responsible’ citizenship associated with
what I.I.Rubin (1928) long ago called ‘commodity capitalism’. (Smith, 2015) While
taking the form of situational tensions arising at specific points of contradiction rather
than experienced as a generalized antipathy to capitalism and the state, this was not
and is not a question of mystical distinctions between ‘their culture’ and ours. Rather
it has to do with the close proximity of practices of everyday livelihood and the daily
need to protect the conditions that make those practices possible – material, social-
relational and ideological.
The point is not to generalize from this case but to note the resemblance to
Lefebvre’s reflections on autogestion which he saw as collective forms of resistant
praxis.
Each time a social group… refuses to accept passively its conditions of existence,
of life, of survival, each time such a group forces itself not only to understand but
to master its own conditions of existence, autogestion is occurring. (2009c: 135)
I have found some extraordinary examples, like in a Mexican shantytown, where
two hundred thousand inhabitants are under complete autogestion. (2009b: 160)
For him the kind of autogestion advocated by Proudhon or the actual self-
management forms that emerged in Tito’s Yugoslavia had either failed economically
or been assimilated by capitalism. (2009c: 134, 135). Instead, extending from his
work on the character of everyday life, Lefebvre saw autogestion beginning in the
economy’s zones of weakness; they are an “opening toward the possible” that he saw
as a conflictual practice that blows a ‘breach in the existing system of decision-
making centres’” (Ronnenberger, 2009: 107) and, as we would expect, he began to
see these zones of resistance to what he saw as the productivist state (socialist or
capitalist) in spatial terms, referring to autogestion territorial. (Lefbvre, 2009b)
Unlike its more general usage, for Lefebvre autogestion did not refer to actual
institutions of cooperative self-management, ‘third sector’ or ‘social economy’
(Laville, 2010) arising in ‘civil society’ but rather to a form of collective resistance to
the alienation arising from the rigidities of what he called “formalism”, the move
toward institutional features necessary for coherence and continuity. As such it offers
a threshold for movement between the volatile potentially constitutive counter-politics

particularistic social spheres. Chatterjee (2008: 57), by contrast remarks that insofar as neither
“political society [n]or electoral democracy have … given these marginalized groups the means to
make claims on governmentality…[they] represent an outside beyond the boundaries of political
society.”
16
It may be, as Kevin Anderson (2010) notes, that resistance of the kind Marx toyed with for the
Indian village does not result in something more ‘progressive’ than what it resists, yet it needs to be
taken for what it is anyway.
Gavin Smith Page 10

I found in Peru, Lefebvre in Mexico and Ciccariello-Maher in Venezuela and the

constitituted politics that comes with the establishing of a revolution, generating the
tensions in dual power that I discuss below.17 So I want to turn now to a discussion of
revolutionary politics seen in terms of historically specific expressions of combined
and uneven development.

Revolution
Like religious enthusiasm the resurgence of revolution, not so much on
pavements as on pages, is something of a surprise. There are a number of crosscutting
currents whose recognition might help to sort out some of the resulting cacophony
and thereby assess whether this efflorescence is good or bad news. Those like
Arendt,18 who are mostly preoccupied with the revolution/violence duo19 and/or take
it to be simply beyond realistic possibility (making its potential violence unethical
avant la lettre) are now being overtaken by a growing swell of discussions of
revolution in terms of how it might be achieved. The spectrum runs from public
intellectuals in high profile jobs whose works are reviewed in the New Yorker or The
Economist to the intricate sectarian discussions across a range of books, websites and
zines.
Of the former group, on one side of the Atlantic Paul Mason’s (2015)
Postcapitalism addresses the possibilities through a hard-nosed understanding of
capitalism and systemic analysis of its ‘post’, while on the other Chris Hedges’
(2015) Wages of Rebellion speaks in terms of moral imperatives while largely
avoiding the difficult business of capitalism. Then, at the lower end of the best-seller
scale are the debates around the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection
(2009) and To our friends (2014), Bifo Barardi’s (2012) The Uprising, or Maurizio
Lazzarato’s (2015) Governing by Debt,20 many of them guilty of what Alberto
Toscano ironically calls “the fallacy of misplaced abstraction.” (n/d: 87) All this is a
lot more fun to read than one more apologia for the works of Keynes or Polanyi, the
angels who will save us if not from capitalism at least from its naughty version,

17
Ciccariello-Maher (2013) frames his interpretation of the Bolivarian Revolution in terms of dual
power much along these lines, while focusing more on questions of politics and less on those of
political economy: “…the vanguard position played by the buherones and the lumpen more generally is
no accident, but is precisely the result of the strategic position this massive class currently holds in
Venezuelan society… the barrios express this dual consciousness and potential for creative self-
activity in their physical being.” (2013: 231; 234-55) See also Bitter, S. J. Derksen & H. Weber. n/d
18
“freedom has been better preserved in countries where no revolution ever broke out, no matter how
outrageous the circumstances of the powers that be, and that more civil liberties exist even in countries
where the revolution was defeated than in those where revolutions were victorious.” Arendt, 1963: 41
19
I do not discuss the issue of violence as such in insurgent situations. For excellent discussions of
violence and the subjective experience of ‘revolutionary time[s]’, see the collection in Grandin &
Joseph’s (2010), the former noting, “Studies of third world violence increasingly replace analytic
categories with metaphysical ones.” (Grandin, 2010: 7) Unfortunately a great deal of analytical
precision is lost by Grandin himself in his strange fixation on the work of Arno Mayer who is
congratulated for avoiding, “diffusing power into the mysteries of bureaucratic alienation, commodity
fetishism, cultural hegemony, or similar abstractions that others identified as the keystones of modern
life.” (ibid: 12) Analytic categories, it seems, are fortunate in having a concreteness that distinguishes
them from abstractions.
20
All published by Semiotext(e)
Gavin Smith Page 11

neoliberalism. Yet the fact is that we are mostly left still befuddled about what a
revolution is or was and hence what we might do to make or avoid one.
A good place to begin is with Neil Davidson’s (2015) distinction between
political and social revolution, a distinction which, with some variation, was used by
many historians who worked on the issue at least since Brinton’s 1938, The Anatomy
of Revolution. The first refers to a politically radical change in personnel and the
second to an attack on the entire institutional apparatus of the regime with greater or
lesser thoroughness in prior goals or subsequent success.21 For long, across the
political spectrum revolution was confined to the latter definition by political theorists
and historians, who then devoted their contentions to other matters. This appears no
longer to be the case for so-called specialists in the current century most of whom
devote entire works to a loosely defined topic. (See Goldstone, 2001) If the problem
were mostly one of descriptions of past happenings in foreign lands it would be bad
enough, oranges and reds, Springs and floods, could all be given their 15 minutes. But
if the distancing and retrospection are used for the carving out of hopeful present
struggles and muddled future alliances, things get problematic.
As I have noted earlier, an important distinction arises from what we might call
the progressive liberal and the Marxian historiographies of revolution. In reading
books like Brinton’s (1965), Arendt’s (1963) Skocpol’s (1979) or Mayer’s (2000) we
find social revolution compared in what we might call parallel chronology: that is to
say, while obviously the chronology matters (there are learning curves) revolutions
can be understood as identifiable blocks whose composition and unfolding can then
be taken apart and put back together rather like Humpty Dumpty: failed reform of the
ancient regime, revolutionary honeymoon, revolutionizing the revolution, thermidor,
and so on.22 Unsurprisingly the Marxian historiography while concerned with the
unfolding of revolutionary politics is especially concerned with characterizing
revolutions as class projects and seeking to discover the key class actors in, for
example, the English, Dutch, French, Haitian and Russian Revolutions. In this respect
the actual revolutionaries in the Russian Revolution were as determined to get their
history of the French Revolution and of the failed revolution of 1871 right, as are any
of the professional historians who have followed them. (Deutscher, 2015; Davidson,
2012b) The success of revolution was not just dependent on understanding what
happened in a previous one, but in what manner it was the expression of a rentier,
bourgeois etc. revolution and how to understand emergent capitalism either as the
catalyst of social upheaval, or a result of the politically precocious bourgeoisie. In
1905 or 1917 Russia, or 1927-8, or 1947 China these questions of history were very
much political questions of the present.
While it is obvious that these seminal revolutions were social and not merely
political, equally obviously our ability to judge has to be after the fact. A number of

21
De Angelis, (2014: 301) however, appears to use the term ‘political revolution’ to refer to social
revolutionary outbreaks, as defined here, and ‘social revolution’ to refer to a longer term series of
‘recompositions.’
22
These are a modified version of the chapters in Bailey Stone’s (2014) Anatomy of Revolution
Revisited.
Gavin Smith Page 12

writers on the left have noted that the distinction is harder to draw without this
privilege of hindsight. For one thing in learning from prior cases, for political
purposes it might be important to know if the original project of key revolutionaries
was the overthrow of the entire institutional machinery of the existing society, or
whether a revolt aimed initially at unseating the powers-that-be perforce became
something more. And here we find ourselves entering into the debates among
participants that remind us that all revolutions arise from resistant individual and
collective subjects and thus are the outcome of ‘combined liberation struggles’.23
There is no historical evidence of a revolution whose institutional outcome be it at the
Jacobin or Thermidor moment resulted from the carefully laid plans of key
participants the blame-game vis a vis Robespierre, Lenin or Mao notwithstanding.
Following these reflections it is probably not what ‘causes’ a revolution and the
questions surrounding its beginning that should matter to revolutionaries of the left,
but what happens nearer its maturity. “The problem then, is not how to resist capitalist
exploitation but how best to ensure that a revolution might last long enough, and go
far enough, to destroy it.” (Hallward, 2014: 29) While it is doubtful that this can be
discussed absent of the counter-revolutionary currents that have historically arisen,
themselves both conjunctural and contingent, its recognition does help us to dispense
with some of the debates that arise out of a failure to recognize these more important
realities of revolutionary maturity. I will mention just two here, the first more briefly
than the second: they are the notion of prefiguration and questions which effectively
return us to the issue of political versus social revolution that I place under the broad
rubric of dual power.
It would require a kind of historical myopia that could only be termed blindness
to suggest that the form the Haitian, Chinese or Cuban revolutions took were in no
way a result of the distinct paths that led up to them. (See for example, C.L.R.James
2001) Can we, however, reverse time, and ask the opposite kind of question? Is it
possible for the form of insurgent struggle to be such as to prefigure the society its
participants wish to be its result? Conversely, does the discipline required of armed
struggle pre-empt the possibility of a socialist society in its wake? If the answer is
affirmative then of course armed struggle is out, leaving all the violence for the other
side. It is this, the idea that prefiguration requires that counter politics be if not a
perfect reflection of the future society then at least the practice for perfection, that has
come to dominate the meaning of the term. This is unfortunate because, while the
ideals that set them off cannot be discounted, historically the twists and turns of
fortune have had such a profound effect on the outcome of insurgent struggles that to
make prefiguration understood in this way the criterion for correct revindicative
politics seems wasteful. It is what Massimo De Angelis (2014: 302) calls ‘the fallacy
of the model’ remarking “Unfortunately, history does not work this way.”
Nevertheless a somewhat more practical version of prefiguration and one that
brings it close to the meaning of dual power I am about to employ is one that was
23
Webber (2012) uses this expression to refer to “the integral unity of the simultaneous opposition to
racial oppression and class exploitation in the Bolivian context between 2000 and 2005.” Webber,
2015: 592 ft19. I have borrowed the term to describe more widespread diversity.
Gavin Smith Page 13

employed by the Black Panthers in the early seventies in which medical, educational
and food programmes were to be the basis for institutions that would replace their
capitalist or state-run counterparts.24 Here the securing of territory and the need to run
initially ad hoc ‘spaces of embryonic emancipation’, as Feuchtwang and Shah (2015)
call them, that then become the basis of an incipient kind of society takes us into the
realm of the kind of partisan war that was preliminary to the Chinese Revolution and
persists in a number of countries in the global South – and is pretty much the reverse
of ‘horizontalism’.
When we speak about insurgency or counter-politics terms apparently poles
apart are found to have confusing and yet politically important overlaps. This suggests
that the second issue – dual power – is a great deal more complex than prefiguration
and can only be addressed by reference to specific historical conditions. Insurgencies
that come together to form large scale combined liberation struggles by their very
nature are both conflicts against one or more enemy (national and extra-national -
always) and on-going internal contentions about immediate tactics and longer term
strategies. In the process of these internal and external struggles the issue for example
of whether the revolutionary goals are to be confined to a change of personnel or
extended to what I am calling a social revolution will undergo perpetual modification.
And then these matters take on a further hue once some kind of power has been
achieved and must be given one institutional form or another. All this means as well
that the question of whether to integrate into an established political party or keep the
revolutionary options clear by resisting the siren-song of existing power structures is
by no means confined to the pre-revolutionary strategy of social-democratic reform
versus revolution.25 It pursues insurgent politics from the outset, through the
“February rehearsals”, and the capture of power, to the period of thermidor and even
post-revolutionary international alliances.
Though discussed in general terms earlier, especially by Trotsky, the question
of dual power arose in actuality in February 1917 when the Petrograd Soviet had to
decide what its relation should be to the liberal Provisional Government set up after
the tsar’s abdication. For Lenin the soviets were not simply alternate models to the
duma, rather their associational form and their armed militias, not dissimilar to the
Paris Commune, might provide a new state form that would expand to replace the
power against which they were set. There was in effect an external and an internal
element then to dual power: the soviets confronting the Provisional Government, and
within the revolutionary struggle the energy of the movements on the one hand and
the need for some kind of institutional form on the other. (Lenin, 1964: 38-41) “Need
we recall,” notes Lefebvre, “that Lenin… did not see [the soviets] as representative
bodies or as bodies intended to elect representatives, but rather as groups of
associated workers, freely managing and directing their interests?” (2009a: 145) The

24
The same is the case for the institutions currently being run by Islamic State in many of its areas of
control.
25
As Neil Davidson (2015: 144) notes for the recent case of Greece’s fight with the ‘Troika’, “reforms
themselves have the potential to constitute revolutionary demands in a context where the system is
unable to allow them, for fear of interrupting the restoration of profitability.”
Gavin Smith Page 14

issues thus raised then, can usefully be discussed across a wide range of political
conditions. These include the value of recognizing non-revolutionary parties or
institutions for strategic reasons, to respecting diverse incipient institutional forms in
the early days of the revolution so as to offset the violent encounters that can arise
with shared commitment to the socialist future pursued via different paths. I think it is
useful therefore to discuss the rocky road encountered all along the way through the
lens of the possibilities of and for dual power.26 Here I use the Evista project in
Bolivia to discuss this point.
In one of his discussions of the radical political changes that have taken place in
Bolivia in the past fifteen years, Jeffery Webber (2015) speaks of ‘combined
liberation struggle’ through the lens of the utopian revolutionary imaginaries
Mariátegui (2011) evoked. He does this via the notion of grass-roots communal
democracy on the one hand, and the benefits of a compensatory state based on income
from resource extraction on the other. From this narrative we are able to see the way
in which formations of revolutionary alternatives arise out of a marriage between a
variety of past political visions among different participants and the contingent
possibilities thrown up by the struggle itself. In other words the praxis of the
insurgent struggle calls forth dialogues among participants about the different
conditional futures they imagined in the past. And this often-prolonged moment of
“the making” provides the pathways for various roads into rebellion and thence into
possibilities of a period of dual power thereafter. Webber does this through the
conflicting figures of two key members of the armed struggles of the early nineties,
García Linera currently in the Morales government and Felipe Quispe, ‘El Condor’ a
figurehead of the Aymara national movement.27
Through the last decade of the 20th century the Tupaj Katari guerrilla’s use of
the anti-colonial rebellion of 1781 and the many outbreaks in the following century
were primary elements in radicalizing the Aymara revindication movement. From
Quispe’s release from prison in 1997 through his election as Executive Secretary of
the Confederación Sindical Únion de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia
(CSUTCB) in 1998 to the uprisings in the new century “A process emerged through
which the very state institutions of the Bolivian republic were called into question.”
(2015: 594) Writing in 2001, Quispe made the case for revolution:
The cause was not only water, coca, territory, land. Rather, the cause already has
sown the seeds to take over political power, to govern ourselves with a
communitarian socialist system based in our ayllus and communities. (Quispe,
2001: 178. Quoted in Webber, 594)
After Evo Morales formed his government in 2006 García Linera also spoke in terms
of a revolution:

26
I expand then, on Lenin’s usage, thus distancing myself from the earlier usage by Proudhon. This
latter anarchist heritage has led to suggestions that any ‘alternative institutions’ from currencies to
coops are instances of dual power.
27
Though he does not employ the notion of dual power in the article cited, the following account is
indebted to Jeffery Webber’s work.
Gavin Smith Page 15

In the case of Evismo, we are before a political revolution that has its impact in the
economic realm but not in a strictly radical manner. Evo Morales has
conceptualized the process… as a democratic cultural revolution….that modifies
the structures of power, modifies the composition of the elite, of power and rights,
and with this the institutions of the state. (Quoted in Webber, 580. My italics)
So here we see two versions of a threshold between securing power and radical
institutional change. Once in government as Vice-President, García Linera (2011)
wrote an authoritative piece on the phases of a revolutionary process which, in his
assessment postponed the establishing of socialism in Bolivia for at least 50 to 100
years. (Webber: 580). Nevertheless, as he saw it, the country had now put the major
class contradictions in the past, at least for the moment, and had entered into a stage
rather of ‘creative tensions’ within the national-popular bloc. The first of these was
between the state’s administrative duties and “the ongoing socialization of
deliberative processes” of the various social movements which made the state a kind
of government of social movements. (Ibid: 582). A second tension arose from the
multi-class character of the popular bloc and the demands of the separate class
interests. As he sees it patriotic elements of the bourgeoisie can be incorporated while
the vanguard remains the popular sectors. Taken together these mean that government
has a duty to critique particularisms that might degenerate the revolutionary process.
Of particular concern here are those movements that obstruct the natural gas, oil, and
export mono-crop national spaces that provide resources which make possible the
compensatory state. (Gudynas, 2012). So what is unfolding here are elements of dual
power that do not simply arise out of a tension between institutionalization and the
movements, but out of the goals of the revolution itself – the extractive compensatory
state on the one hand and the multinational state on the other.
Studies such as this suggest that radical left initiatives are more usefully
interpreted via a thorough engagement with the politics of revolution than left to
supposedly progressive liberal – read social democratic – scholarship.28 This is rather
obviously so for cases such as the FARC in Colombia, the EZLN in Mexico, the
Bolivarian project in Venezuela or the Maoist resistance in Naxalbari, India. But
perhaps such a perspective could cast a different light too on the wretched of the earth
who exist “only for the eyes of doctors, judges, gravediggers and beadles,” as Marx
once remarked.
And this leads me back to a perspective on social subjectivity that points up the
experience of being in a state of albeit frustrated resistance, in contrast to a social
subjectivity arising from the failure to be incorporated as a citizen or respected as a
productive worker. I do not mean to introduce a figure that either balances that of the
citizen still less replaces it. Rather I see the entertaining of such a social agent –
individual or collective, confused or coherent, ephemeral or perpetual – as a heuristic
tool cognate with a revolutionary critical perspective on actuality, just as the citizen is
cognate with a social democratic project. It is very far from an invitation to find
28
By far the most interesting work in this regard is Neil Davidson’s (2012b) How revolutionary was
the bourgeois revolution? For an especially provocative argument see his (2015) “Is revolution still
possible in the twenty-first century?”
Gavin Smith Page 16

resistance everywhere or to romanticize forms of rejection whatever the politics that

comes with them.29 If anything it is an invitation to shift the form of intervention of
social enquiry from descriptive concepts to ones that entangle the enquirer in a critical
praxis that would reconfigure their intervention in the world they study and hence the
kind of responsibility that comes with intellectual work.

Conclusion
Despite the trek I have taken across old ground, the purpose of this paper has been
exploratory, tentative, possibly provocative. I have simply wanted to write an account
that respects the revolutionary political imagination, rather than taking it as some kind
of perverse diversion from proper-thinking discussion of the road forward. In doing so
I have used the idea of unevenness and combination not only to explore my subject
but also as a style –unevenly combined! – for discussing the rich variety of thinking
along these lines. In proposing the idea of the resistant I began by noting that such a
figure is always to be found as a hidden halo redeeming but always failing the moral
liberal. And then I proposed that we might understand forms of social distress and the
struggles that result therefrom less as failures to become what it is impossible to
become and rather as the necessary counter-life to the society of capital. I asked if
something might be gained by seeing such a world not simply as the tailings left by
capitalist extraction but rather as containing necessary rejections and refusals of
capital’s abstractions past and present. In a sense the wager here is what might happen
to our methods and our concepts were we to design them from this standpoint.
In then turning to revolution I have tried to make us go through the exercise of
taking seriously some of the elements that go into its constitution, rather than simply
imagining it as always a project condemned by its failures and doubly so in the terror
and violence that go with them – and yet that pale in comparison with capitalism’s
perpetual toll which is, as Barrington Moore (1966: 103-4) pointed out long ago, “at
least as atrocious as those of revolution, perhaps a great deal more”.
Controversial though most of the issues discussed here are, I have dealt with
each of them superficially (and of course, partially), wishing only to set an agenda
that differs from what I see to have become a rather hermetic orthodoxy in which the
realm of the possible has been narrowed to what is seen to be politically realistic. Yet,
“[i]n political thought and in political theory,” noted Henri Lefebvre, “the category
(or concept) of the ‘real’ should not be permitted to obscure that of the possible.
Rather, it is the possible that should serve as the theoretical instrument for exploring
the real.” (2009c: 125)

29
It should be clear that the intellectual agenda here is as far as it is possible to get from the cynical
despair and the conservative political implications of the much cited work of James Scott in this
respect. (Scott, 1985; 1990)
Gavin Smith Page 17

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