In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. Perry Anderson

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СКАЧАТЬ forward in the mid-seventies did punctually occur, if with a violence that was far from my expectation of it. Edward Thompson’s prolonged and passionate polemic with Louis Althusser, The Poverty of Theory, turned an intellectual page — irreversibly. Whatever our view of the merits of the dispute, it is henceforward impossible for Marxists to proceed — as they did for many years, on either side — as if their history and their theory were two separate mental worlds, with little more than occasional tourism, mildly curious, between them. Theory now is history, with a seriousness and severity it never was in the past; as history is equally theory, in all its exigency, in a way that it typically evaded before. The assault by Thompson on Althusser also exemplified the breaking down of one further, crucial barrier: that which had always confined the major schools or debates within Western Marxism to national contexts, ensuring mutual ignorance or silence between them, to the detriment of any genuinely internationalist discourse. This twofold gain — the new exchanges between history and theory, and across national frontiers — has been among the most fruitful changes in the past decade. That they are not mere swallows without a summer can be seen from the kindred styles of debate over the work of Immanuel Wallerstein on the world capitalist system, probed in essentially theoretical terms by Robert Brenner among others, and over the work of Brenner on the transition to capitalism, in its turn — the focus of one of the widest professional controversies since the war, with international responses from historians in Germany and France, England and Poland.²⁰ Similarly, the discussion of value theory in Marxist economics no longer has national boundaries, even of a temporary sort: the circuits of argument switch freely from Japan to Belgium, Canada to Italy, Britain to Germany or the US, as recent symposia testify.²¹

      So far, then, the hopes and hypotheses advanced in my Considerations on Western Marxism seem to have been largely realized. But any note of satisfaction, let alone self-satisfaction, would be out of place. For in one absolutely decisive respect the flow of theory in these years did not run in the direction I had envisaged. The reunification of Marxist theory and popular practice in a mass revolutionary movement signally failed to materialize. The intellectual consequence of this failure was, logically and fatally, the general dearth of real strategic thinking on the Left in the advanced countries — that is, any elaboration of a concrete or plausible perspective for a transition beyond capitalist democracy to a socialist democracy. Rather than a ‘poverty of theory’, what the Marxism that succeeded Western Marxism continues to share with its predecessor is a ‘poverty of strategy’. It is impossible to point out any single body of writing in these years which reveals, even faintly, the kind of conceptual attack, the combination of political resolution and theoretical imagination that marked the great interventions of Luxemburg or Lenin, Trotsky or Parvus, in the years before the First World War. The determinants of this central deficit, which precludes any triumphalist retrospect of the past decade, pose the question of the larger social conditions in which Marxism developed in these years. But before we look at this wider historical context, it is necessary to take stock of a phenomenon whose ultimate relation to the strategic void remains to be ascertained, but whose immediate reality seems in the most clamorous contradiction to any claim for a renaissance of historical materialism in the seventies. I refer, of course, to what came to be called — among those most affected by, or interested in, it — the ‘crisis of Marxism’. This process gave rise to the exultant covers of American and European mass media in 1977, of which Time magazine was only one. But although the scale and speed of the phenomenon were dramatic enough, the term itself was always a misleading one. What was really at issue was the crisis of a certain Marxism, geographically confined to Latin Europe — essentially France, Italy and Spain. Within this cultural and political area, there was indeed something approaching a collapse of the Marxist tradition by the late seventies, at the very moment when Marxism was conquering or consolidating new positions across a wide front outside it. It would be foolish to underestimate the gravity of this rout, not only for the countries concerned, but for the general credit of a rational socialist culture as a whole.

What were the characteristic syndromes of this crisis of Latin Marxism? Two major patterns can be distinguished. On the one hand, amidst a recrudescence of violent anti-communist fevers in the surrounding capitalist polity, in France and Italy especially, there was an abrupt and widespread renunciation of Marxism altogether, by thinkers of older and younger generations on the Left alike. The most spectacular reversal in this respect was perhaps that of Lucio Colletti, once the foremost Marxist philosopher in Italy, who in the space of three or four years became a shrill enemy of Marxism and staunch defender of a more or less conventional liberalism. His most recent book is not inappropriately entitled The Passing Away Of Ideology,²³ in unconscious reminiscence of a celebrated text in American sociology of some twenty years ago. In France, Sartre in his last years followed his own trajectory from denunciation of communism to formal renunciation of Marxism, in his case in the name of a radical neo-anarchism.²⁴ The mutation, or decline, of these eminences was no isolated affair, however. It corresponded to a much wider change of mood in literary and philosophical circles once associated with the Left. Emblematic in this regard were the writers and critics of the Tel Quel group, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva and others, who switched virtually overnight from strident asseverations of materialism and a cult of the social order in China, to revaluations of mysticism and exaltation of the social order in the United States.²⁵ André Glucksmann, barricade rebel and intellectual protege of Louis Althusser in the late sixties, became the leading publicist of the ‘New’ Philosophy — that is, a reiteration of the oldest themes in the ideological arsenal of the Cold War in the fifties, such as the equation of Marxism with totalitarianism, the identification of socialism with Stalinism.

Meanwhile, there was a second type of response to the change in political temperature in Latin Europe in the late seventies. This was not so much an outright repudiation or relinquishment of Marxism, as a dilution or diminution of it, pervaded by an increasing scepticism towards the very idea of a revolutionary rupture with capitalism. Symptomatic of this trend was Althusser’s growing distance from the political legacy of historical materialism as such, expressed in the denial that it had ever possessed any theory of State or politics, and betokening a radical loss of morale in one whose assertions of the scientific supremacy of Marxism had been more overweening and categorical than those of any other theorist of his time. Soon it was Althusser who was propagating the notion of ‘a general crisis of Marxism’ — a crisis he showed little haste to resolve.²⁶ Poulantzas, for his part, once a pillar of Leninist rectitude, now rediscovered the virtues of parliaments and the dangers of dual power: his final interviews before his death spoke, beyond even these, of a crisis of confidence in ‘politics’ as such.²⁷ The shadow of Michel Foucault, soon proclaiming the ‘end of politics’²⁸ as Bell or Colletti had done of ideology, no doubt lay heavily on these Parisian doubts. In Italy, the Communist Party itself was increasingly rife with similar currents. Its leading younger philosopher, Massimo Cacciari, told Italian workers from his chair in the Chamber of Deputies that Nietzsche had outdated Marx, the will to power proving more fundamental than the class struggle; while a sometimes sympathetic interest in the ideas of Friedman or Bentham could be found among many of his colleagues.

No intellectual change is ever universal. At least one exception, of signal honour, stands out against the general shift of positions in these years. The oldest living survivor of the Western Marxist tradition I discussed, Henri Lefebvre, neither bent nor turned in his eighth decade, continuing to produce imperturbable and original work on subjects typically ignored by much of the Left.²⁹ The price of such constancy, however, was relative isolation. Surveying the intellectual СКАЧАТЬ