Re: just a thought - again

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jurriaan wrote:
>I regret to say I never met Anderson or
>Brenner, but I have profound respect for them and wish them the very best.
>With their books and literary work, they have stimulated many important
>debates, which got other people to think and write and act  - which would
>not have occurred, except for their personal efforts. Good lecturers ?

First, on Brenner. I don't think his more recent writings on the world
economy have been harmful. They seem more relevant than ever, don't they?
But my quarrel with him (and Ellen Meiksins Wood) is over the question of
the transition from feudalism to capitalism. I believe that Brenner's ideas
on this question have encouraged a kind of Kautskyism, as I have stated
repeatedly.

As far as Anderson is concerned, he seems rather like a burnt-out case to
me. The NLR has been retooled as a post-revolutionary project under his
auspices. It led Boris Kargalitsky to write an angry attack on Anderson and
the other editors that made its way around the Internet. Unfortunately I
can't find a copy.

Don't get me wrong. I think that the NLR is a useful asset for the academic
left. I have a whole stack of them at home collecting dust on my shelves. I
do plan to work my way through them after I retire. I am especially
interested in articles like Alain Supiot's "The Ontologies of Law" that
appeared in the Jan/Feb 2002 issue.

New Statesman, March 19, 1999

The New Statesman Profile - Perry Anderson; He is one of Britain's great
Marxist intellectuals, yet now he seems a strangely conservative figure.
By Edward Skidelsky

Perry Anderson exemplifies a type that has almost vanished: the
unaffiliated intellectual. The leading British Trotskyite, he has never
belonged to a political party. An eminent historian, he has never held a
full-time post at a British university. His writing belongs to none of the
various categories of academic literature; it attempts, at its most
ambitious, to comprehend them all in a total synthesis. His thought owes
allegiance to no national tradition; it belongs to the floating corpus of
western Marxism. It is fitting, if ironic, that this revolutionary
free-booter should finally settle at the University of California at Los
Angeles. Repressive tolerance has triumphed over one of its fiercest
adversaries. Anderson is notoriously elusive. No interviews, no broadcasts
- and even the London School of Economics, where he is a visiting lecturer,
did not have a photograph to contribute to the illustration of this
profile. Yet for all his elusiveness, his influence on British intellectual
life has been enormous. The conduit of this influence was the New Left
Review, the socialist bi-monthly which he edited from 1962 to 1982.
Anderson's goal was the introduction into Britain of a new kind of
socialist culture, alternative to both the official Marxism of the
Communist Party and the stolid reformism of the Labour Party. His followers
saw themselves as a revolutionary vanguard. Inspired by Gramsci, they aimed
to establish a socialist hegemony in the realm of ideas from which, they
hoped, a revolutionary movement would follow. The leading lights of
Continental Marxism - Lucacs, Gramsci, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse and
Althusser - were published and discussed, often for the first time in
Britain. Non-Marxist structuralists such as Lacan and Levi-Strauss were
also introduced. High theory was interspersed with the other amour of the
era: Latin American terrorism.

Anderson's cosmopolitanism is partly a product of biography. He was born in
1940 into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family; his father was an official in the
Chinese Maritime Customs. Eton and the stuffy Oxford of the 1950s no doubt
exacerbated Anderson's distaste for 'spiritual patriotism'. Marxism offered
the alternative of a truly international ideology, and Trotskyism, with its
tradition of 'revolution in more than one country', was the most
internationalist variant of Marxism. Anderson cites, as precedent for his
own attitude, 'the scorn of Marx and Engels for German provinciality and
philistinism, of Lenin and Trotsky for Russian religiosity and Oblomovism,
of Gramsci for Italian operatics and sentimentalism'. The cosmopolitanism
of Marxist theory was, one suspects, a stronger source of appeal for
Anderson than its promise of social justice. His is a socialism of the
head, not the heart.

The agenda of the New Left Review was set out by Anderson in a couple of
fierce polemics: 'Components of the National Culture' (1968) and 'Origins
of the Present Crisis' (1964). They are the most scintillating essays he
has written. The mediocrity of postwar intellectual life in Britain is the
subject of the former. Written with a young man's scorn, the essay surveys
and dismisses British contributions to history, philosophy, political
theory, psychology and aesthetics. These local failings are the consequence
of a more fundamental vacuum: the absence, at the centre of British
intellectual life, of any general theory of society that might unify the
disparate branches of inquiry. Sociology, in Anderson's view, is the queen
of the sciences. In its absence, intellectual life fragments; a process
dignified by the English totems of 'empiricism' and 'piecemeal research'.
This failure is not innocent; nothing is innocent for a Marxist. The
absence of social theory serves to perpetuate the bourgeois social order;
that which cannot be conceived cannot, a fortiori, be attacked.

'Origins of the Present Crisis' was one of a series of articles by Anderson
and Tom Nairn offering a historical explanation for the predicament
analysed in 'Components of the National Culture'. The failure of the
English bourgeoisie to develop a coherent world-view was, they argued, a
consequence of its failure to draw a clear line of opposition between
itself and the aristocracy. The revolution of 1640 was aborted: the reform
of 1832 half-hearted. A corrupt bargain was struck between nobility and
capital, in which the former lent dignity to the latter in return for the
preservation of its constitutional privileges. The timidity of the
bourgeoisie in the face of the aristocracy was later paralleled by the
timidity of the proletariat in face of the bourgeoisie. 'A supine
bourgeoisie produced a subordinate proletariat.' The proletariat accepted
from the bourgeoisie the 'timid and dreary' philosophy of Fabian
gradualism. The result was 'Labourism, most stolid and mundane of political
movements'. This denigration of British history provoked a passionate reply
from E P Thompson, a Marxist of very different lineage. Anderson responded,
and their exchange is as interesting and as revealing as the
better-remembered 'Two Cultures' debate between F R Leavis and C P Snow.

Anderson's argument was put forward as an explanation not only of Britain's
cultural conservatism, but also of her relative economic decline. It
addressed a widespread mood of the 1960s, in which anti-establishment
attitudes were mingled with anxiety about falling growth. The image of the
'clean break' seemed to answer both problems at once. It quickly became
part of the lexicon of Wilsonism; its echoes are still audible today in
Blair's rhetoric of 'modernisation'.

The influence of the New Left Review increased steadily under Anderson's
editorship, its circulation rising from 2,000 to 8,000. Its impact was
particularly strong in the new universities and polytechnics, where it
contributed to the formation of that leviathan called critical theory. But
as the New Left Review entered the 1980s, it became increasingly clear that
the revolution it had initiated would not spread beyond the academy. And
even there, its influence was confined to certain sub-disciplines in the
humanities. All it had achieved, in fact, was the replacement of one kind
of intellectual provincialism with another. It could hardly have been
otherwise, given the collapse of socialist politics in this period.

The movement away from practical politics towards questions of culture and
ideology is characteristic of western Marxism as a whole. The failure of
Marx's political and economic predictions left his disciples with only one
remaining role - that of Kulturkritiker. As Anderson himself points out,
'the hidden hallmark of western Marxism . . . is that it is the product of
defeat'. His attitude towards it is ambivalent. Admiring its
sophistication, he reproaches it with 'culturalism' and contrasts it
unfavourably with the classical tradition of Trotsky. Even Gramsci, the
most politically minded of the great western Marxists, is accused of
shifting the burden of revolutionary struggle on to the cultural sphere and
neglecting the mechanics of state power.

Anderson is too intelligent and honest to deny the intellectual and
political triumph of the right in the past decade, and yet he has never
formally renounced his revolutionary convictions. They have just sunk
quietly into the background, becoming a kind of coda to what is now his
main occupation - the exposition of other people's ideas. In this he is
masterly. Yet intellect and political loyalties still occasionally
conflict, producing confusion. A good example of this is his essay on
Francis Fukayama's The End of History. Fukayama's grand narrative of
historical progress - even though it culminates in the triumph of bourgeois
liberal democracy - is of precisely the kind to win Anderson's admiration.
Anderson defends it against its detractors, claiming, on impeccably Marxist
grounds, that their various refutations of Fukayama's hypothesis amount to
nothing more than local difficulties, and do not constitute a genuine
contradiction. But then - as if suddenly realising what he has admitted -
he amasses a whole set of difficulties of his own, ranging from
environmental problems to feminism. But these are no more a fundamental
contradiction than the difficulties he has previously dismissed. All are
manageable within the confines of the present world-system. Fukayama has
beaten Anderson at his own game.

Defeated on the political plane, Anderson has at last succumbed to the
'siren voices of idealism'. His latest essay, The Origins of Postmodernity,
is a work of cultural criticism in the classic tradition of Benjamin and
Adorno. It is essentially a defence and an elaboration of Frederic
Jameson's thesis that postmodernism constitutes 'the cultural logic of late
capitalism'.

Postmodernism is a natural target of attack for a Marxist. What it
signifies is the final disappearance of any critical perspective on the
capitalist order. The Soviet Union, for all its imperfections, provided
such a perspective, and its existence sustained the avant-garde throughout
Europe and America. Now there is nothing but capitalism. Any revolt is
immediately assimilated and commodified. Art, realising this, has abandoned
its haughty intransigence and entered into alliance with the market. The
tone of the essay is one of sorrowful resignation. Anderson can diagnose
the malady, but he has no cure.

There is something strangely conservative about Anderson's denunciation of
a world in which, to quote Jameson, 'we are henceforth so far removed from
the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of
artificial stimuli and televised experience'. All that remains of Marxism,
now that the political illusions have been shattered, is nostalgia for a
lost seriousness. It can hardly be a coincidence that the fiercest critics
of postmodernism, the most intransigent defenders of the eternal verities,
have all been Marxists: Alex Callinicos, David Harvey and Terry Eagleton.
At first glance this appears an ironic reversal, but on reflection it could
hardly have been otherwise. Marxism cannot be other than conservative,
because the one truly revolutionary ideology of the modern world - under
whose sign 'everything solid melts into air' - is capitalism.


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org



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