Re: Rebuilding Western Marxism ?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jurriaan wrote:
> When Perry Anderson popularised that term, he had in mind something
> non-sectarian which was not explicitly Trotskyism, which was not simply
> Deutscher-type Classical Marxism, which was not Soviet or Chinese-dominated
> Marxism, which was not simply Togliattism etc. but which at the same time
> acknowledged that there were all these Marxists in the European tradition
> (and possibly the United States) who had tried to embroider further on the
> thought of Karl Marx in a creative and independent way, for example Gyorgy
> Lukacs.

This is not what Perry Anderson intended at all. His "Considerations of
Western Marxism" was a slashing attack on academic Marxism, a term that I
prefer to Western Marxism. He says that the trend, which can be pretty much
summed up as turning Lukacs, Gramsci et al into academic specialities in
the fashion of the American Language Association and Jane Austen, is all
about a retreat from class, to use Ellen Meiksins Wood's term (she is much
stronger on this than she is on the Brenner thesis.)

He also says that the trend is the product of disappointment and
demoralization with the rise of Stalinism and the failure of the western
working-class to display openly revolutionary attitudes. Here is an excerpt
from chapter four of Anderson's book, which is one of my favorite by the way:

It will be seen that the successive innovations of substantive theme within
Western Marxism, just surveyed, reflected or anticipated real and central
problems that history posed to the socialist movement during the
half-century after the First World War. Gramsci's absorbing concern with
hegemony prefigured the consensual stabilization of the capitalist State in
the West, two decades before it emerged as a durable and general
phenomenon. Many of Adorno's preoccupations with nature, at the time an
apparently perverse by-way of the Frankfurt School, suddenly reappeared in
the later widespread debate over ecology within the imperialist countries.
Marcuse's analyses of sexuality presaged the institutional breakdown of
erotic constraints and sensibility, emancipation as enervation,
characteristic of much bourgeois culture after the mid-sixties. Althusser's
main excursus on ideology was directly inspired by the wave of revolts
within the higher educational system of the advanced capitalist world in
the same period. Sartre's treatment of scarcity schematized the universal
crystallization of bureaucracy after every socialist revolution in the
backward countries, while his dialectic of series and groups anticipated
much of the formal course of the first mass rising against capitalism in
the developed countries after the Second World War (France in 1968). The
relative value or adequacy of the solutions advanced by each system to the
problems under its purview is not our concern here. It is rather the
collective direction of the theoretical innovations peculiar to Western
Marxism that needs to be elicited and emphasised.

For, no matter how otherwise heteroclite, they share one fundamental
emblem: a common and latent pessimism. All the major departures or
developments of substance within this tradition are distinguished from the
classical heritage of historical materialism by the darkness of their
implications or conclusions. In this respect, between 1920 and 1960,
Marxism slowly changed colours in the West.
The confidence and optimism of the founders of historical materialism, and
of their successors, progressively disappeared. Virtually every one of the
significant new themes in the intellectual muster of this epoch reveals the
same diminution of hope and loss of certainty. Gramsci's theoretical legacy
was the prospect of a long war of attrition against an immensely stronger
structure of capitalist power, more proof against economic collapse than
had been envisaged by his predecessors - a struggle with no final clarity
of outcome visible. His own life in-defectibly bound to the political fate
of the working class of his time and nation, Gramsci's revolutionary temper
was tersely expressed in the maxim 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of
the will': once again, it was he who alone consciously perceived and
controlled what was to be the timbre of a new and unheralded Marxism. The
pervasive melancholy of the work of the Frankfurt School lacked any
comparable note of active fortitude. Adorno and Horkheimer called in
question the very idea of man's ultimate mastery of nature, as a realm of
deliverance beyond capitalism. Marcuse evoked the Utopian potentiality of
the liberation of nature in man, only to deny it the more emphatically as
an objective tendency in reality, and to, conclude that the industrial
working class was itself perhaps absorbed past recall within capitalism.
The pessimism of Althusser and Sartre had another but no less grave
horizon, the very structure of socialism itself. Althusser declared that
even communism would remain opaque as a social order to the individuals
living under it, deceiving them with the perpetual illusion of their
liberty as subjects. Sartre rejected the very idea of a true dictatorship
of the proletariat as an impossibility, and interpreted the
bureaucratization of socialist revolutions as the ineluctable product of a
scarcity whose end remained inconceivable in this century.



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


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