Rebuilding Western Marxism ? Reply to Louis Proyect

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis wrote:

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.

Thanks for your correction of my notes, I haven't got the Considerations
handy here to look it up. What you say is of course true; the main thrust of
Perry's appraisal of Western Marxism was indeed the break between theory and
political practice, that Marxism had been mainly a university activity, an
academic Marxism, and in fact he mentions Mandel as I recall as one of the
few contemporary people who tried to operate the "classical" apparatus of
Marxist thought, Mandel being somebody with a genuine political praxis, i.e.
sought to develop Marxist theory with an organised practical-experiential
political engagement, or at least that was the implication, and Anderson
implies (from memory) that this is precisely what explains Mandel's
intellectual advances. By contrast, the older Sartre would mainly just
wander into a demonstration but he didn't have a clear party-political
commitment, for the rest just write books and articles pretty steadily.

The erudite Italian Marxist Sebastian Timpenaro made a similar point from a
slightly different angle in his book On Materialism, where he notes that the
development of Marxist theory in Western Europe consisted in seeking to
absorb the latest fads in the academic sciences and showing that Marxism
could deal with them... and then being assimilated by those fads, leaving
the terrain of Marxism to a greater or lesser extent, along the Goethian
delusionary principle of "you think you push, and you are pulled". Thus for
example, Levi-Strauss would do his thing on structuralism, then Althusser
would say "yeah, Marx said it already, but anyhow we can understand what
Marx said better, by this concept of structuralism, we can integrate it",
and before you knew it we were talking about "history as a process without a
subject" and leaving the terrain of Marx, who said quite explicitly that
"history does nothing, real living men make history" (paraphrase).

But for the rest I don't think my interpretation isn't so bad here, let's
just think a bit further then what Perry Anderson said back then. In the
first place: there WERE political Marxists in Europe, namely in the official
communist parties, Soviet-aligned or Chinese-aligned, plus you had numerous
Trotskyist and Council Communist groups as well, and Marxists within the
social democratic parties and unions. And these people WERE engaging in
political theorising in the West. Now why wasn't Perry talking about them,
in his Considerations in any great detail ? Did politics suddenly vanish in
post-war capitalism ? Why, for example, abstract Althusser to a great extent
from the internal controversies within the PCF ? Presumably, because (apart
from his growing sympathies for Mandel's group and his disenchantment with
Maoism) he was interested in (1) the specificity of the Western European
contribution to Marxism independently from Moscow or Peking, (2) he was
trying to capture the Zeitgeist as far as local Marxism was concerned, (3)
he felt that the official party-Marxism lacked innovation and originality
and implicity could hardly even be described as real Marxism, being rather
the ossified detritus of a previous generation (4) he was focusing on great
Western European thinkers who had innovated in Marxist theory, on an
intellectual tradition, a history of ideas (he hardly mentions the USA). And
he did so within the frame of reference of "the product of disappointment
and demoralization with the rise of Stalinism and the failure of the western
working-class to display openly revolutionary attitudes". His concern was
similar to that expressed by Mandel in the introduction to his Traite
d'Economie Marxiste, which Isaac Deutscher (writing in "The Economist")
considered the best attempt to revitalise Marx's economic doctrines since
the Second World War, even if the true doctrine was often found in the
heresies.

But this perspective was itself based on a certain aloofness from organised
party politics by Perry Anderson himself, who saw his own main task as an
intellectual one: to provide a new, stimulating, creative literature of a
high standard, to publish that in NLR and through NLR/Verso Books, to bring
the latest, best and most sophisticated trends to an Anglo-Saxon audience
and thus fertilise the rather barren soils of British empiricism, American
pragmatism and analytical philosophy with fresh ideas, making them more
aware of the need for another theory and another history, for doing real
research in different areas, for new concepts, new intellectual vistas. And
he didn't leave it at that, he also penned "big canvas" summaries of
(mainly) European history, based on secondary literature, such as Passages
from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, which
inspired the likes of Fritjof Tichelman and Marcel van der Linden here in
Holland (both originally activists in the small Socialist Workers Party of
Holland).

My previous comments relate to the paradox this involved for Perry.

Perry noted disappointment and demoralisation in the Western working
classes, resulting in a break between theory and political practice, in
discontinuities and ruptures in the Marxist fabric; yet at the same time, he
is not actually tracing out the political practice that was really there
anyway, in any profound way, he only sort of hovers over it, he is looking
chiefly at intellectual contributions, at a literature, not at the precise
links between theory and political practice and the real shape of class
conflicts. Of course it was not true at all that the Western working class
was passive; his new muse, Mandel himself, was justabout bowled over by the
Belgian General Strike episode of 1960-61, just when he had completed his
big book on Marx's economic ideas, and Mandel in fact had to write a long
article in French explaining the Belgian General Strike. A couple million
striking workers in France in May 1968 is likewise not small thing, and
hundreds of thousands of Italian strikers in the Italian "Hot Autumn" wasn't
a small thing. Okay, I am talking about class conflict, not necessarily a
genuine class struggle, even so, you cannot say European workers were just
totally passive, they did do things actively.

So what I am suggesting here is that in the thought of Perry Anderson, we
have something approaching an idealist theory of class struggles and
political battles, a picture which presents the icing without the cake, and
doesn't really fully explain where the cake came from, and who made it. It
expresses the frustrations of a gifted intellectual who just doesn't see
what he would like to see. In his own stories, the working class largely
disappears as an active subject, whereas the working class is active all the
time, it is as though he is peering at the working class with a telescope
from an astronomical distance with numerous coloured filters, a bit like the
covers of Verso books in the 1970s and 1980s.  In the attempt to provide a
grand overview, an historical stocktaking, a political and intellectual
appraisal, he is skimming the surface only, and that surface he calls
Western Marxism, and that Marxism is a description applying mainly to
Western European Marxism, and within that, he is focusing mainly on people
who think about ideas. And he finds both that there was definitely
innovation going on, but it was not so "classical" or "orthodox" and it
wasn't so clearly related to a definite political practice.

Nevertheless he calls this highly select aggregation of his, "Western
Marxism" of which he proposes to be able to characterise the main features
and moods. What I am suggesting is that this concept can only be a kind of
sociological Weberian ideal-type, but more importantly, this ideal-type is
itself actually very deceptive, because it suggests there was such a thing
as Western Marxism when there really wasn't, unless we just throw a whole
bunch of disparate phenomena in the West into a big heap of Marxism. It was
just wishful thinking, it was something that Anderson hoped to help create,
a Marxism in Western Europe which would stand on its own intellectual feet
and feats. Certainly there were Marxists and semi-Marxists in different
European countries, but they just did not constitute a distinctive tradition
and reflected a whole range of very different concerns in different
countries. And therefore if you want to bring all this under one heading
"Western Marxism" then you generate your own disappointment and
demoralisation, because you are trying to see something that was not really
there.

Maybe I am guilty of an Andersonite picture-painting error myself in the
sense that the full argument I am making has to be much more elaborate to
make it stick, going beyond Elliott's retrospective perspective on the life
and times of Perry, and maybe I am trying to connect too many issues at
once. But I think the main lines of my argument are pretty solid, even if I
am getting a pain on my fingers.

I 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"

Meaning that Anderson was trying to recover an original, creative
intellectual tradition indigenous to Western Europe which could be built
upon, and assess its strengths and weaknesses. This is a perfectly
legitimate exercise, it is just that if you are a Marxist then it doesn't
really work in the way he does that, and it leads to errors. And if you
don't believe me, just have a look at the long-after-the-fact assessment
which Perry Anderson actually makes of e.g. the decline of social democracy
(e.g. articles in ATC), and you will learn, that his own idea of the
theory-practice relationship is actually a distortion at the very least. I
do not say that the distortion isn't useful in the Weberian ideal-type
sense, it is just that it doesn't resolve the problem of disappointment and
demoralisation, and it doesn't lead to the rebuilding of Western Marxism at
all. Because basically the real problems involved are missed by a mile
through the astronomer approach (or if you like the helicopter approach),
because the ground troops are hardly even visible from that distance.

The proof of the pudding is where Anderson is now, after painting such
tremendously erudite, learned and all-encompassing abstract overviews of the
movement of thought: he set himself a task which he could not achieve, and
then (as someone mentioned recently) he is puzzled by the massive size of
the demonstrations against war. This is not dismissing Anderson's
commendable intellectual achievement and its fruitful effects, but it is
saying that "if this is what you want to do, you are going about it in the
wrong way", and then we ought to inject a healthy dosage of American
pragmatic thought into the intellectual formulations, as a corrective.

Jurriaan






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