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Bhaskar Sunkara wrote:
> I'm actually just re-reading Considerations on Western Marxism now. I
> think Perry's piece was engaging, but that line did catch me by
> surprise (lower case "c" too)... did he give up on Marxist histography
> sometime after 1980? Because Arguments Within English Marxism,
> Considerations and his extended essay on Gramsci from the 1970s are
> masterpieces. Of his recent stuff I don't know, but I think his
> Renewals essay from 2000 and his critical coverage of The Age of
> Extremes have their merits. I'm far more critical of the recent
> trajectory of Tariq Ali.
>
The key to understanding Perry Anderson is his disillusionment
with socialist revolution and a newly developed interest in
bourgeois ideology that surfaced in a 2000 NLR article and which
should explain his nod to the Brookings Institute guy.
This is a good analysis:
Issue 88 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL Published Autumn 2000
The 'historical pessimism' of Perry Anderson
GILBERT ACHCAR
In its 40 year existence the distinguished New Left Review (NLR)
journal, whose first issue came out in 1960, appeared to have
become an institution as firmly anchored in tradition as Britain's
monarchy or parliament. At the dawn of the new century, however,
it has taken its entire readership by surprise and changed its
editorial formula. The first issue in the year 2000 inaugurates a
new series and so carries the number 1--after 238 bi-monthly
issues according to the old formula. This 'second series' provides
the opportunity for a change in layout and cover following a
remarkable consistency over the past four decades.
The new layout is airier, with a clearer typeface (a necessary
concession to the rising average age of its readers!), a brief
introduction to the authors of the main articles in each issue (up
till now the journal would not on principle publish any
information about the authors of its articles, other than in
exceptional cases) and a systematic review section. In addition
there is a commitment to publish debates regularly--the first
new-look issue carries two debates: one between Robin Blackburn
and Henri Jacot on pension funds as a possible lever for a 'new
collectivism' under popular control and the other between Luisa
Passerini and Timothy Bewes over a recent work by the Italian
historian devoted to European culture.
Perry Anderson, who took control of NLR very soon after its
foundation and tirelessly inspired it, has given the whole thing
punch by opening the new series with an editorial of which the
least that can be said is that it is not banal! Under the title
'Renewals', this remarkable theoretician of history has sketched
out a fresco of the political and intellectual development of our
world, using the savoir faire he shares with such masters of
English-speaking Marxist historiography as Isaac Deutscher and
Eric Hobsbawm.
Over time Perry Anderson has become more and more a practitioner
of the 'pessimism of the intellect' championed by Gramsci. In his
editorial he has now pushed this philosophical virtue to
surprising extremes. For long, it is true, Anderson has displayed
an inordinate taste for the superlative, a taste those familiar
with his work know well. Nevertheless his writings have always
been exciting and particularly enriching. But the editorial of the
new series goes well beyond the momentary exaggeration that flows
from individual idiosyncrasy.
What he shows towards the state of both the world and the radical
left is, rather, a kind of bitterness peculiar to a whole section
of that generation of left intellectuals whose seniority means
they now dominate the universe of critical social thought. This
was the generation which expected the 1960s to open up a bright
future and then became brutally disillusioned by the success of
the reactionary counter-offensive in the 1980s, the culminating
apotheosis of which was the collapse of the Stalinist empire and
the advent of a unipolar world under US hegemony in the last
decade of the 20th century.
From the 1980s onwards a section of this generation withdrew from
all militant political activity. Partly it did so out of distaste
at the unappetising spectacle which the existing organisations of
the radical left offered at the time (and still do), and partly
because fatigue led it to abandon the task of constructing a more
attractive political formation. This section retained its basic
attachment to the left but tempered it considerably. After its own
fashion it experienced a development closely resembling the one
which emerged in response to the ebbing of the Russian Revolution
and the rise of fascism, and which Perry Anderson himself analysed
not so long ago under the heading of 'Western Marxism'.
The parallelism is striking and certainly self conscious to such
an extent that it constitutes what could be called a 'syndrome of
Western Marxism'. The best definition can be found in Perry
Anderson's own celebrated Considerations on Western Marxism. 'The
hidden hallmark of Western Marxism as a whole,' wrote Anderson,
'is thus that it is a product of defeat'.1 This variant of Marxism
was characterised by 'an ever increasing academic emplacement of
the theory that was produced'2 and evolved into 'an esoteric
discipline whose highly technical idiom measured its distance from
politics',3 this was 'the sign of its divorce from any popular
practice'.4 In these circumstances 'the needle of the whole
tradition tended to swing increasingly away towards contemporary
bourgeois culture'.5 Though diverse, the theoretical innovations
of 'Western Marxism' shared 'one fundamental emblem: a common and
latent pessimism'.6
What Perry Anderson wrote in 1976 provides the best clue both for
understanding how the editorial content of the NLR has evolved
since the 1980s and for reading Perry Anderson today. What does he
now argue? Not content with stating that there has been a relative
worsening of the balance of forces between capital and its enemies
at a world level, he makes this acknowledgement of defeat the
cornerstone for how the contemporary left should define itself:
'The only starting point for a realistic left today is a lucid
registration of historical defeat'.7 As he sinks into despair
Perry Anderson paints everything in the sombre colours of a defeat
which seems representative of a fully blown new 'midnight in the
century'.8
Worse still: for intellectuals, on their own ideological terrain,
the present defeat has been unequalled for centuries if we are to
believe Perry Anderson. 'For the first time since the Reformation,
there are no longer any significant oppositions--that is,
systematic rival outlooks--within the thought world of the West;
and scarcely any on a world scale either, if we discount religious
doctrines as largely inoperative archaisms,' he has no hesitation
in affirming.9 Whatever its practical limitations, 'neo-liberalism
as a set of principles rules undivided across the globe: the most
successful ideology in world history'.10
What is particularly striking is that Perry Anderson seems more
convinced of the omnipotence of neo-liberalism than most of its
supporters! He paints a picture of the world which paradoxically
offers much greater reassurance for the American empire than
Washington's strategic commentaries (political or military,
official or semi-official) or eminent think tank discussions about
American imperial politics do.11 To take just one example,
Anderson's peremptory claim about the near absence of any
systematic, rival perspectives at a world level has only to be
compared with the well known--and fairly phantasmic--thesis of
Samuel Huntington on the 'clash of civilisations'.
In reality NLR's editor has espoused another well known, but less
widely shared, viewpoint--Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history'
thesis, which he takes more seriously than most Western or
non-Western commentators. Gregory Elliott's book on Perry Anderson
underlines this point and lets us situate the latest reflections
of the NLR editor in the context of not only his personal
development, but NLR as a whole since its creation.12 Elliott's
work is a truly thorough, if a trifle laboured, account which
enables us to trace the totality of Perry Anderson's thought over
a period of 40 years.
What is interesting about this study is that it provides some kind
of intellectual portrait of the 'new left' generation which
developed from the 1960s onwards and of which the NLR was the
chief organ (more or less the equivalent of Die Neue Zeit for
'orthodox Marxism'). Elliott describes the ideological
polarisation of this generation between Maoist/Althusserian and
Trotskyist/Deutscherian currents, with the latter eventually
gaining the upper hand within NLR in the 1970s. In highlighting
the hopes which the NLR group, following a tradition which owed
more to Isaac Deutscher than to Leon Trotsky, invested in the
Soviet Union, Elliott's analysis subtly allows us to understand
the catastrophist Weltanschauung which has gripped Perry Anderson
in the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The work gets
livelier and more captivating the closer we get to the present
period. 'Renewals' appears as striking confirmation of Elliott's
pertinent commentaries on the intellectual peregrinations of his
object of study.
Why should a thinker like Perry Anderson, whose inspiration is
Marxist, take as his own the thesis advanced by that most illusory
incarnation of bourgeois idealism, Fukuyama, a thesis
categorically rejected by neo-liberalism's own 'realist'
partisans? Why should he place the new series of NLR under the
sign of such an extreme defeatism/pessimism (from the left's point
of view, and triumphalism/optimism from the right's, like in the
original thesis)? To be sure, this situation demands an
explanation quite different from that in respect of Fukuyama's
impressionistic thesis, born in the immediate aftermath of the
fall of the Berlin Wall. Between Anderson and Fukuyama there are
not, nor could there be, any 'elective affinities'; there is only
the momentary intersection of two opposed trajectories.
Now, even if one sticks with 'the thought world of the West',
which Anderson's diagnosis has as its priority concern, one's
vision of actual social and ideological confrontations has to be
particularly muddled by pessimism to affirm that 'there are no
longer any significant oppositions' and that neo-liberalism 'rules
undivided'. Just how exaggerated this diagnosis is becomes even
more obvious in Anderson's later judgement on critical thought
about capitalism, specially among students: 'Virtually the entire
horizon of reference in which the generation of the 1960s grew up
has been wiped away--the landmarks of reformist and revolutionary
socialism in equal measure'.13
That impression may well be the one which comes from frequenting
universities reserved for the social elites. It is certainly not
the impression to be found in ordinary universities in the London
or the Paris regions! That 30 years since 1968 and in the wake of
the collapse of the Soviet Empire the present generation of
students has neither the same reference points nor illusions as
the 1968 generation of their parents should not surprise us in the
least. In particular, nothing could be more natural than
disaffection with political parties, both large and small. Plainly
the student movement in general is affected by the crisis of
political representation amongst the wage earning masses in the
wake of social democracy's mutation and Stalinism's death agony.
Nevertheless revolutionary socialist currents are still very much
in evidence in the universities. Above all, there is the well
attested development of semi-anarchist currents, or substitutes
for political parties in the form of networks and associations,
which testify to a radical opposition to neo-liberalism and its
destructive effects.14
If we take the situation in France, certain facts come to mind,
such as: the December 1995 movement; the numerous sectional
strikes which keep on bursting out (teachers and financial civil
servants have recently brought down two ministers); the continuing
development of new trade unions to the left of the traditional
ones (eg SUD); the unprecedented electoral advances of the
Trotskyist far left; the distribution rate of nearly a quarter of
a million for a radical but not popular-looking monthly paper
opposed to neo-liberalism (Le Monde Diplomatique); the near 20,000
membership of a campaign organisation against neo-liberalism
(ATTAC); the huge commercial success of the cry of disgust at
neo-liberalism (The Economic Horror), and so on. Who from the
French side of the Channel could subscribe to Perry Anderson's
diagnosis?
Of course, for more than two centuries France has been, par
excellence, the land of class struggle. Equally, the Anglo-Saxon
countries have experienced the greatest triumphs of
neo-liberalism. And it is no coincidence that the two following
phenomena have gone together. On the one hand, the United States
and Great Britain are the countries where Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher, the two main champions of neo-liberalism,
operated and where the reactionary counter-offensive in the 1980s
was acted out in its toughest form. They are also the countries
where, when the pendulum swung back towards the centre under Bill
Clinton and Tony Blair, the 'recentring' of the 'new centre'
remained most firmly anchored to the right. On the other hand,
these two countries are where the similar phenomenon to what Perry
Anderson called 'Western Marxism' and whose principal
characteristics we looked at earlier came most fully into its own.
Accordingly, the phenomenon of these last two decades could
perhaps more appropriately be designated as 'Anglo-Saxon Marxism',
as opposed to the 'Western Marxism' of the previous epoch. But
such a formula would be unfair to the many Marxist and
Marxist-influenced works produced in the English speaking
countries over the last decades which are foreign to the paradigm
of 'Western Marxism'. This fact alone testifies, incidentally, to
the enormous difference in the terrain of western class struggle
(on which 'the thought world of the West' ultimately depends)
between the scale of defeat in the inter-war period and that in
the last quarter century.
Are the recent demonstrations against the neo-liberal order in
Seattle and Washington, the movements around demands in the world
of American labour over the last two years, or even the campaign
around Ken Livingstone in London signs of a reversal in mood, the
first fruits of a new wave of radicalisation, which could change
the intellectual climate in the English speaking world? One can
legitimately hope this is so without sowing illusions.15 In
reality, Perry Anderson's editorial itself expresses profound
pessimism while simultaneously and unmistakably marking a new
radicalisation: the editor of NLR demonstrates a particularly
combative mood, thus confirming a new radicalisation in the
journal noticeable since the war in Kosovo.
This closing episode in 20th century history was the 'defining
moment' for the western intellectual left, an opportunity to draw
a line in the sand, which the last few years had partially
obscured. NLR came through this test, firmly on the side of the
left and faithful to the tradition of its origins. Let us wish
that at the beginning of the new century the new series will
successfully accompany the unavoidable new forms of
anti-capitalist radicalisation just as effectively as the old
series did in the second half of the century just gone.
Notes
1. P Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (Verso,
1976), p42.
2. Ibid, p49.
3. Ibid, p53.
4. Ibid, p54.
5. Ibid, p55.
6. Ibid, p88.
7. P Anderson, 'Renewals', New Left Review 2/1,
January/February 2000, p16.
8. Ernest Mandel, once a source of inspiration for Perry
Anderson and a major influence on NLR, before he died was right to
be shocked at the exaggerated melancholy of our generation: 'What
would you have done, then, if you had been active in the 1930s,
when Nazism and the Moscow trials intertwined?' was his constant
refrain.
9. P Anderson, 'Renewals', op cit, p17.
10. Ibid.
11. The balance sheet drawn up by Perry Anderson on the Balkan
War ('Renewals', op cit, p12) puts a much rosier glow on the
imperialist order than the great majority of those drawn up by
most Western commentators. Anderson is one of the very few to
believe that the war in Kosovo 'suggests how much stronger the New
World Order has become since the early 1990s'. He points to the
fact that the war in 1999 took place without as great a
mobilisation as for the Gulf War, but omits to point out that in
1999 nearly twice as many days of intensive bombing were required
to end it and that the Iraqi surrender had nothing in common with
the compromise obtained by Belgrade with Moscow's support.
Anderson forgets that Milosevic's forces, including the troops
massed in Kosovo, emerged from the war much more intact than those
of Saddam Hussein. This oversight allows him to claim, without any
proof, that the Kosovo war will 'in short order' lead to the
overthrow of the Belgrade regime, quite unlike the Bagdad regime
which survived the Gulf War. Anderson also manages to imply that
Moscow's attitude in the 1999 war was more favourable to the
American undertaking than it had been in 1990-1991, which is
blatant untruth. He has the same inverted reading of the facts of
the Chinese attitude. One might almost wish that Perry Anderson
would read the imperialist press to raise his spirits!
12. G Elliott, Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of
History, Cultural Politics series, University of Minnesota Press
(Minneapolis, 1998).
13. P Anderson, 'Renewals', op cit, p17.
14. It is notably the case in US universities: see the report
by Liza Featherstone, 'The New Student Movement', in The Nation
(New York), 15 May 2000.
15. One striking aspect of Perry Anderson's ultra-pessimism is
the way in which he raises very high the bar for a new
modification of the balance of forces acting against
neo-liberalism, succumbing thereby to a particularly crude
economic determinism. Thus, according to him, the present balance
of forces 'will probably remain stable so long as there is no deep
economic crisis in the West' ('Renewals', op cit, p19). Following
this, he goes one step further and adds: 'Little short of a slump
of inter-war proportions looks capable of shaking the parameters
of the current consensus' (ibid). Apart from its exaggerated
character, this judgement carries a surprising reading of history
from the pen of such a far-sighted historian. Quite the opposite
is needed: let us wish that the new period of economic growth is
consolidated so that the new wave of radicalisation which appears
to be taking shape is strengthened. The long recessions of the
inter-war period and of the last quarter of the 20th century led
to a significant worsening of the balance of forces. Conversely,
even Durkheim understood that boom phases are favourable to
radicalisation of demands because of the expectations they raise.
Besides, a new expansion under the present neo-liberal conditions
of development in global capitalism clearly could not reproduce
the 'virtuous circle' which flattered the Western working class
during the long post-war boom.
This article is translated from the French original published in
Actuel Marx 28, 2nd Semester 2000.
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