Weekend Reading: From Perry Anderson (1976): Considerations 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: scrutiny of the economic laws of motion of capitalism as a mode of production, analysis of the political machinery of the bourgeois state, strategy of the class struggle necessary to overthrow it. 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....
The reduction of space for theoretical work to the constricted alternatives of institutional obedience or individual isolation crippled any possibility of a dynamic relationship between historical materialism and socialist struggle, and precluded any direct development of the main themes of classical Marxism. Within the Communist Parties, all discussion of the post-war imperialist economies, of the State systems of the West, and of the strategic conduct of class struggle, was strictly reserved for the bureaucratic apex of these organizations, itself conditioned by overall allegiance to official Soviet positions. Outside the ranks of organized Communism, there was no apparent foothold within the mass of the working class, from which to develop any intelligible revolutionary analysis or strategy--either because of Communist predominance in the local proletariat (France/Italy), or because of its overwhelmingly reformist loyalties (Germany/USA).... 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....
The progressive relinquishment of economic or political structures as the central concerns of theory was accompanied by a basic shift in the whole centre of gravity of European Marxism towards philosophy.... 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--precincts at once of refuge and exile from the political struggles in the world outside....
The external determinants which acted to move the main focus of Marxist theory from economics and politics towards philosophy... were inscribed in the sombre history of the period. But this shift could never have occurred so generally and drastically if there had not been a powerful internal determinant... 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.... The peak of the influence of the philosophical writings of the early Marx was reached in the late fifties, when themes from them were diffused on the widest scale throughout Western Europe....
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, as the central terrain of his thought, the successors of the tradition that emerged after 1920 increasingly turned back from econo mics 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. Theory became, for a whole historical period, an esoteric discipline whose highly technical idiom measured its distance from politics.... Marx after 1848 always sought to present his thought in as simple and lucid a way as possible, to maximize its intelligibility to the working class.... By contrast, the extreme difficulty of language characteristic of much of Western Marxism in the twentieth century... was the sign of its divorce from any popular practice....
Adorno's Marxism represented, by the sixties, an extreme version of its renunciation of any discourse on classes or politics.... Yet Adorno's Negative Dialectic... attacked philosophical con centration 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....
The confidence and optimism of the founders of historical materialism, and of their successors, progressively disappeared . Virtually every one of the significant new themes in the intellectual muster of this epoch reveals the same diminution of hope and loss of certainty.... Gramsci meanwhile, in prison and defeat, summed up the vocation of a revolu tionary 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.
Benjamin and Gramsci were victims of fascism. But in the post-war epoch, too, the note struck within Western Marxism was often no less sombre....
The concentration of theorists into professional philosophy, together with the discovery of Marx's own early writings, led to a general retrospective search for intellectual ancestries to Marxism in anterior European philosophical thought, and a reinterpretation of historical materialism itself in the light of them... a marked predominance of epistemological work... the major substantive field in which method was actually applied became... cultural superstructures... [and] a consistent pessimism. Method as impotence, art as consolation, pessimism as quiescence.... The root determinant of this tradition was its formation by defeat--the long decades of set-back and stagnation, many of them terrible ones in any historical perspective, undergone by the Western working class after 1920....
The advent of a new period... is now however visible. The French Revolt of May 1968 marked in this respect a profound historical turning-point... a massive revolutionary upsurge occurred within advanced capitalism.... The re-emergence of revolutionary masses outside the control of a bureaucratized party rendered potentially conceivable the unification ofMarxist theory and working-class practice once again.... In 1969, the Italian proletariat unleashed the greatest wave of strikes ever recorded in the country; in 1972 the British working class launched the most successful industrial offensive in its history, paralysing the national economy; in 1973 Japanese labour mounted its largest assault against capital to date. In 1974, the world capitalist economy entered its first major synchronized recession since the war....
Many of the major theorists of Western Marxism discussed above are now dead. Those who survive have so far proved unable to respond to the new conjuncture.... 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?.... It is these series of questions that constitute the central challenge to historical materialism today....
The 'organic intellectuals' envisaged by Gramsci, generated within the ranks of the proletariat itself, have not yet occupied the structural role in revolutionary socialism that he believed would be theirs. The extreme forms of esotericism that have characterized Western Marxism were symptomatic of 'traditional intellectuals' in Gramsci's sense, in a period when there was little or no contact between socialist theory and proletarian practice. But in the long run, the future of Marxist theory will lie with intellectuals organically produced by the industrial working classes of the imperialist world themselves, as they steadily gain in cultural skill and self-confidence....
Revolutionary theory can... only acquire a correct and final form when bound to the collective struggles of the working class... close connection with the practical activity of the proletariat is necessary... a linkage with actual masses... when the masses are themselves revolutionary.... These five conditions for the successful pursuit of Marxism have not been assembled anywhere in the advanced capitalist world since the Second Worid War. The prospects for their reappearance are now, however, at last increasing. When a truly revolutionary movement is born in a mature working class, the 'final shape' of theory will have no exact precedent. All that can be said is that when the masses themselves speak, theoreticians--of the sort the West has produced for fifty years--will necessarily be silent.
