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In a massive (15, 308 words) article that appears in the current New Left Review, Perry Anderson addresses “Two Revolutions”, namely the Russian and the Chinese. My expectations were that Anderson would be interesting as well as wrong. He did not disappoint. Mostly the article can be reduced to a kind of laboratory experiment where one rat is compared to another. The rat that has been fed a constant diet of Big Macs will look sickly while the one that eats wheat germ and yogurt will look great. That, in a nutshell, is how Anderson approaches Russia and China. China’s success story, we are told, has a lot to do with “communism”, a term that Anderson deploys much more in the terms of bourgeois social science than Marxism. This is to be expected from somebody who announced to the world in 2000 in a NLR article titled “Renewals” that: By contrast, commanding the field of direct political constructions of the time, the Right has provided one fluent vision of where the world is going, or has stopped, after another—Fukuyama, Brzezinski, Huntington, Yergin, Luttwak, Friedman. These are writers that unite a single powerful thesis with a fluent popular style, designed not for an academic readership but a broad international public. This confident genre, of which America has so far a virtual monopoly, finds no equivalent on the Left. Little did Anderson suspect that only a few years later Fukuyama would do a 180 degrees turn and disavow his “end of history” thesis under the impact of an imploding financial system. That being said, he still seems smitten by the prospects of being “fluent” and “powerful”. I for one place much more importance on being truthful and revolutionary. read full article: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/perry-andersons-weberian-turn/ ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com