A critique of the NLR

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Pessimism of the intellect: the New Left Review and the 'conjuncture of 1989'
Duncan Thompson

Suitably chastened by the events of 1989-91, and maintaining an Olympian
perspective in preference to the closer scrutiny of, and engagement with,
the admittedly small and fragmented opposition to the neo-liberal order on
the ground (though certainly no smaller than the detachments of the Fourth
International to which the Review was oriented in the seventies), the
Review began to articulate (without ever explicitly endorsing) a minimalist
liberal-socialism - involving an unacknowledged acceptance of key themes of
the lately reviled new revisionism, and an abandonment of its erstwhile
revolutionary politics without so much as a word of critical reflection. In
After The Fall, published by Verso in 1991, Blackburn, for example, now
insisted that 'the Left must respect the complex structures of
self-determination which the market embodies', whilst the collection of
essays led, significantly, with Norberto Bobbio, whose 'distinctive
synthesis of liberalism and socialism' had won Anderson's praise in the NLR
in 1988; in the new conjuncture, wrote Anderson, Bobbio had come 'into his
own'. The collection contained not one contribution from an identifiably
revolutionary socialist perspective. Mandel, previously so prominent in the
Review, was conspicuously absent, whereas Hobsbawm, only recently
reprehended as an instigator of the new revisionism, contributed two
essays, both reprinted from Marxism Today.

While a liberal-socialism may be justified in the immediate-term as a
rallying point upon an unfavourable terrain, the Review, given its precise
advantage of thinking in terms of 'epochs and continents', ought to have
been better placed than most to offer a bolder, longer term perspective.
Unwilling to connect with those social and political forces contesting
global capital, the Review's rare interventions in contemporary politics
have been curiously modest in scope. In 1991 Anderson wrote approvingly
that Charter 88 had proved the 'liveliest recent movement within civil
society' - pointedly ignoring the poll tax rebellion, a far livelier
movement, and one which, moreover, could take no small credit for
Thatcher's downfall. In the Review's first intervention in a British
general election since 1964, Blackburn advocated tactical voting in 1992;
cautiously welcoming Labour's 1997 victory as a 'Velvet Revolution'. It is
not enough to recognise, with Anderson and Camiller, that social democracy
has 'lost its compass', '[t]rapped between a shifting social base and a
contracting political horizon', where financial deregulation and
international currency speculation have undermined its traditional
Keynesian policy tools and the 'new tax aversion' has 'drastically
narrowed' the 'limits of fiscal initiative'. Social democratic management
of capitalism was never what we meant by socialism, then or now. The 'new
reality' is indeed 'a massive asymmetry between the international mobility
and organisation of capital, and the dispersal and segmentation of labour,
that has no historical precedent', and it may be that, for the present, the
'globalisation of capitalism', far from drawing 'the resistances to it
together', has 'scattered and outflanked them', resulting in 'a reduction
in social capacities' to fight for an alternative to capitalism'. The
point, however, is to explore the basis upon which new coalitions within an
internally divided global working class can be built. The triumph of
neo-liberal capitalism is unmistakable, but not uncontested.

While we should indeed endorse an uncompromising realism in preference to
facile illusions in the prospects of radical social change, global capital
is not invincible. If extraordinarily dynamic, it remains inherently
unstable. Its greater reach merely multiplies the points at which it may
breakdown and begin to unravel. If, in its new series, the New Left Review
is unlikely to abandon the undoubted advantages of its Olympian
perspective, engaging with those social and political movements that are
actively contesting global capital in the task of making a New Left will
help guard that a salutary pessimism of the intellect is leavened by an
equally necessary optimism of the will.

full: http://www.ethos.freeuk.com/polis/symposium4c.htm


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


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