Hoisted from Other People's Archives: Perry Anderson's (1976) Hanging Judgment on "Western Marxism"
From Perry Anderson (1976): Considerations on Western Marxism: "The consequence of this impasse...
...was to be the studied silence of Western Marxism in those areas most central to the classical traditions of historical materialism.... Gramsci is the single exception to this rule--and it is the token of his greatness, which sets him apart from all other figures in this tradition.... For over twenty years after the Second World War, the intellectual record of Western Marxism in original economic or political theory proper--in production of major works in either field--was virtually blank....
Luxemburg and Kautsky alike had been united in their scorn for Kathedersozialisten--'professorial socialists' teaching in the universities, without party commitments.... After the end of the Second World War, however, Marxist theory had migrated virtually completely into the universities....
The belated revelation of the most important early work of Marx--the Paris manuscripts of 1844... published for the first time in Moscow in 1932.... Western Marxism as a whole thus paradoxically inverted the trajectory of Marx's own development itself. Where the founder of historical materialism moved progressively from philosophy to politics and then economics... the successors... increasingly turned back from economics and politics to philosophy--abandoning direct engagement with what had been the great concerns of the mature Marx, nearly as completely as he had abandoned direct pursuit of the discursive issues of his youth.... The language in which they were written came to acquire an increasingly specialized and inaccessible cast....
Adorno's Negative Dialectic... attacked [his peers'] philosophical concentration on alienation and reification as a fashionable ideology, susceptible to religious usage; the cult of the works of the Young Marx at the expense of Capital; anthropocentric conceptions of history, and the emollient rhetoric of humanism accompanying them; myths of labour as the sole source of social wealth, in abstraction from the material nature that is an irreducible component of it....
Gramsci meanwhile, in prison and defeat, summed up the vocation of a revolutionary socialist in the epoch with a desolate stoicism:
Something has changed, fundamentally. This is evident. What is it? Before, they all wanted to be the ploughmen of history, to play the active parts, each one of them to play an active part. Nobody wished to be the "manure" of history. But is it possible to plough without first manuring the land? So ploughman and manure are both necessary. In the abstract, they all admitted it. But in practice? Manure for manure, as well draw back, return to the shadows, into obscurity.
Now something has changed, since there are those who adapt themselves "philosophically" to being "manure", who know that is what they must be.... There is not even the choice between living for a day like a lion, or a hundred years as a sheep. You don't live as a lion, even for a minute, far from it: you live like something far lower than a sheep for years and years and know that you have to live like that....
After the prolonged, winding detour of Western Marxism, the questions left unanswered by Lenin's generation, and made impossible to answer by the rupture of theory and practice in Stalin's epoch, continue to await replies. They do not lie within the jurisdiction of philosophy. They concern the central economic and political realities that have dominated world history.... What is the real nature and structure of bourgeois democracy?... What type of revolutionary strategy is capable of overthrowing this historical form of State?... What would be the institutional forms of socialist democracy in the West?... What is the meaning and position of the nation as a social unit?... What are the contemporary laws of motion of capitalism as a mode of production? What is the true configuration of imperialism as an international system of economic and political domination?... What are the basic characteristics and dynamics of the bureaucratic states that have emerged from the socialist revolutions in the backward countries?...
