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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/
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