Re: Marx and Antihumanism

["Edward George" <ebgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

In my opinion, the best book that deals with Althusser's work is Perry
Anderson's Arguments within English Marxism (NLB/Verso, 1980). Anderson's
book is a polemic against E P Thompson, inspired by the latter's collection
The Poverty of Theory, whose centrepiece was the essay of the same name
which in turn was directed against Althusser. Thompson's book was
heavy-handed in its criticism of Anderson and Tom Nairn, with whom he had
already had a number of previous run-ins. Anderson's book is a superb
restatement of classical Marxism, and disposes of both Thompson and
Althusser in the process.

Since I am of the view that Anderson's thinking is worthy of a good deal
more critical attention than it normally receives, I am going to take the
liberty of appending some thoughts of mine on him from some notes I wrote
recently.


**************


At some point in the early 1990s I read Perry Anderson's essay 'Origins of
the Present Crisis'. I can remember it having a profound effect on me. What
Anderson had argued (the essay was written in 1964) was that, contrary to
the accepted historical wisdom of both the right and the left, what typified
British society was its relative backwardness-social, political,
cultural-and what explained British backwardness was a premature and
backward seventeenth-century bourgeois revolution. British historical
development was, in this respect, cast as unique within Europe. Anderson
followed 'Origins' in the 1960s with further essays pointing up the
consequences of British cultural and political backwardness; along with
essays by Tom Nairn pursuing a similar vein, their central conclusions are
what has come to be known as the 'Nairn-Anderson Theses'.

[...]

Anderson was the leading force in the group of young turks that assumed the
leadership of New Left Review in 1963. The subsequent achievement of New
Left Review in opening up English speaking left intellectual circles to a
Marxism relatively free from the constraints of Stalinism from this point up
until fairly recently cannot be gainsaid.

What was Anderson's specific contribution within this project? In 1964, as
mentioned, came 'Origins of the Present Crisis', followed by further essays
pointing up the consequences of British cultural and political backwardness.
Then in 1974 came the simultaneous publication of Passages From Antiquity to
Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, an enormous (nearly 1,000
pages combined) survey of European history covering the rise of ancient
Greece to the height of the powers of the European absolutist state. The
concluding section of the latter volume set out the two central themes of
Anderson's discourse: first, that 'what rendered the unique passage to
capitalism possible in Europe was the concatenation of antiquity and
feudalism', that is, that the capitalist mode of production germinated in
western Europe and nowhere else because of the unique 'perdurable
inheritance of classical antiquity'; and, second,  that the lack of a
classical heritage in eastern Europe condemned it to a development
fundamentally divergent to that experienced in the west: 'representing
distinct historical lineages from the start, the Absolutist States of
Western and Eastern Europe followed divergent trajectories down to their
respective conclusions [...] The consequences of the division of the
continent [...] are still with us.' The introduction to this latter book
also outlined the overall nature of the whole project as Anderson then saw
it: couched in terms of a history of the modern state, Anderson projected a
further two volumes, the third taking up where the second one left off in
accounting for the European bourgeois revolutions and a fourth surveying the
present-day capitalist state.

Anderson never developed the project beyond the publication of these two
volumes of 1974. In 1976 he produced the essay 'The Antinomies of Antonio
Gramsci', in which he developed the theme of a structural difference in the
manner of bourgeois rule 'east' and 'west', and a consequent necessity of a
differential socialist strategy across the two spheres; Considerations on
Western Marxism, written in 1974 but published, with an updated postscript,
in 1976, in which Anderson surveyed the development of European Marxist
thought following the drawing of the veil of Stalinism; and Arguments within
English Marxism-a fine book-in 1980, in which, piece by piece, Anderson
demolishes the pseudo-Marxist intellectual outlook of E P Thompson, one of
his earlier critics.

In the 1976 postscript to Considerations Anderson was already expressing
doubts as to some of the basic formulations of classical
Marxism-specifically with reference to what he saw as omissions within the
work of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky with regard to the Marxist theory of
politics, an ellipse which for Anderson was to bear fruit in a catastrophist
cast in later Marxism; without doubt Anderson's doubts here coincide with
the concerns expressed in 'Antinomies'. Although Anderson's devastating
critique of Thompson in Arguments was scrupulously couched in fidelity to
the canons of classical Marxism, one almost has the feeling that Anderson is
more trying to convince himself rather than Thompson or the reader as to the
efficacy of Marxist theory; that for him he rather tested the theory to
destruction is witnessed by his In the Tracks of Historical Materialism
(1983), in which the rather token lip-service paid to historical materialism
is strongly overcast by a treatment of French structuralism. This incipient
break with Marxism was attested to all too clearly by the early 1990s with
Anderson's embrace of the neo-Weberian sociology of Michael Mann. The
publication in 1992 of two collections of his writings spanning 1964 to
1992-English Questions and A Zone of Engagement-appears to be his definitive
signing off from Marxism. His writings after this point have indeed verged
on the incoherent, bother literally as well as intellectually, as his loss
of theoretical bearing pushed his anyway rather over-wrought sentence
structure and lexical extravagance beyond the limits of intelligibility.
Anderson's degeneration is all the more troubling given the heights from
which he fell.

The critical point in this trajectory appears to be 1974; the works from
this point to 1983 we can call, to borrow a phrase from Althusser, 'the
works of the break', as the already accumulated contradictions in Anderson's
thought unravel.

What went wrong? Since Anderson is either unwilling or unable to tell us
himself, we shall have to hypothesise. I hypothesise thus. From 1964 the
central organising principle in his work was the concept of the 'normal'
bourgeois revolution and its absence on the British scene. It is this, I
suspect, that led him to the Passages/Lineages project, a work, given its
breathtaking range of sources, a number of years in the making. Anderson
aborted the project on the verge, historically speaking, of the European
bourgeois revolution: I suspect that on consideration he came to realise
that the concept of the bourgeois revolution which he had embraced up to
this point now revealed itself to him as misguided. Rather than go back to
the beginning and re-order his concepts, to develop a new conception of the
bourgeois revolution more in tune with the principle theme opened up by the
Passages/Lineages project-the historical differentiation in Europe between
east and west-Anderson practically abandoned fresh historical writing, and
ultimately found himself breaking from Marxism. Maybe this decision was
reached in part out of a disappointment with the theoretical apparatus of
Marxism which seemed to be letting him down. In addition, maybe his
subsequent evolution was encouraged by an extrinsic disappointment wrought
by the inability of the European Trotskyist movement to capitalise on the
openings created by the radicalisations of the post-1968 period: 1974 was of
course both the high point and the point of reversal of this period, and
while the 1974 main body of the text of Considerations was fulsome in its
estimation of the growing Trotskyist movement as a potential resolution of
what Anderson posited as the central weakness of post-World War Two
Marxism-the forced rupture of the unity of theory and practice-the book's
1976 postscript is stringent in its concern at the dangers of what Anderson
called an unintentionally 'activist' reading of the main body of the text.

That not all of the above may be pure speculation on my part is evidenced in
the 1992 collection English Questions, which contains a short essay,
previously unpublished, but dated 1974 and cited as a 'talk', entitled 'The
Notion of the Bourgeois Revolution', in which Anderson drew the conclusion
that what was typical of the bourgeois revolutions was their non-typical
nature and their deviation from a 'normal' pattern of development: 'every
one,' he declares, 'was a bastard birth.' I think of this essay as the
preparatory first steps of the third volume of the Passages/Lineages
project, the volume, of course, that never  was.

But this is not to belittle Anderson's contribution, especially that of
1974. Taken together, the Passages/Lineages project marks in my view the
most important and effective intervention by a Marxist into mainstream
historiography yet seen; and in good part this is so because it manages to
escape the theoretical delimitations of an otherwise practically ubiquitous
Stalinist historiographical orthodoxy. The questions that Anderson raises in
these works are fundamental ones for Marxists today: the origins of
capitalism; the nature of capitalist social and political structures in the
eastern and western European sectors: key issues for those wishing to map
out a revolutionary strategy today. But, as we have seen, in the body of his
work lies a central contradiction: the notion of the 'defective' bourgeois
revolution versus fundamental 'normative' models for historical change east
and west. It is a shame that discussion of Anderson's work on the left
limits itself to other works. I suggest that a critical assessment of the
problems and contradictions posed by the Passages/Lineages project would be
a fundamental step forward in the necessary task of the re-establishment of
a tradition of non-Stalinist Marxist historiography.



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