Sunday, July 23, 2006
Considerations On Western Marxism - Chapter 1
For those just tuning in, this is the first of what will be five contributions towards an online reading project. As Marxist bloggers, a few of us decided we could learn a lot from reading a book and discussing it together. Considerations On Western Marxism, by Perry Anderson was a natural choice, and not just since I bang on about it all the time. It's a brief history of Marxist thought, and it's a good introduction to the radical politics we lay claim to. It'll provide a common basis for where we agree and disagree. Or at the least, it'll make us great fun at parties, where we can casually slip into the conversation, "Oh yes, Anderson's 'Considerations' - I know it well."
A few ground rules:
1) I think this should be our responses to the reading - what we think is important, what struck our interest. Summaries are useful if they help illustrate a point, but I don't want anyone to feel pressured to give one.
2) I'd suggest that we keep our intertextual references to a minimum. The point here is to engage with what Anderson is saying, and, I suppose, what the Marxists he talks about are saying. But not what Zizek or Spivak or Haraway might say, lovely though those folks are.
3) Anyone who's not reading the book is welcome to ask questions. But reading the book helps.
So, without further ado: Chapter One: The Classical Tradition
Anderson gives a very brief history of the first 50 years of Marxism. It would do great violence to the richest period in Marxist thought, to claim he's summarizing it in 24 pages. Rather, he's sketching its outline, in order to make a central point: Marxism is historical.
This doesn't mean Marxism and its insights are over, but that it has a context. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky may have been brilliant, but they weren't prophets, holders of received wisdom they occasionally let fall from their lips. They were products of their time, and to fully understand their contributions, we have to understand how they lived. What Marxism did for history, science and politics, Anderson is doing for Marxism. He's taking it out of the realm of ideology, of ideas that exist outside of the humans that created them. He's doing a basic historical materialist analysis - of historical materialism.
And what was that context? I've got three points to make.
1) Marxists are activists
Marx may have wrote Capital Volume One in the library, and he had a PhD, but he wasn't an academic. He fought on the barricades of the failed German revolution in 1848. He spent much time helping found the First International, and intervened actively in its debates. He wrote impassioned journalism defending the Paris Commune.
Showing off? - a Trotsky montage from an early Soviet poster
Lenin lived much of his life in exile, and all his writings were geared towards a single question: revolutionary strategy. He was a Bolshevik party leader, not an idle propagandist. Even when he wrote The Development of Capitalism in Russia, a detailed economic treatise, it was to discern how capitalism worked in Russia, and therefore what the proper revolutionary strategy should be in response.
Trotsky's writings on permanent revolution were a brilliant response to the 1905 Revolution. His later works on art and culture responded to the ferment of post-revolutionary Russia.
Anderson lists others. The point is that none of the 'greats', from Luxemburg to Hilferding, wrote for any other question than Lenin's famous, still-relevant slap in the face to the apathetic and abstract: what must be done? How do we achieve socialism? That's a huge question, and one that can only be answered by breaking it down into smaller parts. But it was the starting point that animated the birth of revolutionary Marxism. These Marxists were far removed from the stuffy, crumbs-in-the-beard image foisted on Marxists today. They were young - all of them wrote their major theoretical works before they were 30. They were angry: Lenin's brother was executed by the Russian regime for trying to assassinate the Tsar. And they were committed, active revolutionaries.
Did it have anything to do with going prematurely bald? - Lenin as a young man
2) Marxism is a product of its time
People ask, "Why didn't Marx come up with a political programme?" It's a fair point; you can point them to the Communist Manifesto, and that's a fine document, but there's little practical advice on what to do, and some stuff about 'holding the bourgeoisie's wives in common' that's easily misinterpreted. Why didn't Marx write more? Anderson answers,
Liberte doesn't seem that into it
Marx was scathing with those who create revolutionary plans for the working class. He had no time for elitists, dreamers or utopians; if your politics didn't come from the struggles of real people, then you had no business telling real people how to do politics. For Marx, the best way to help the struggle was to discover the laws of motion of capitalist society. Capital Vol. 1 wasn't an intellectual exercise, but an intervention in the struggle. It was 'all' he could do, because it was all history had shown him.
Anderson subjects Lenin to the same scrutiny. Lenin's limitations
Right side of history, wrong end of the rifle - Bolshevik soldier about to be shot by the Whites
3) Marxists got the shit kicked out of them
Sorry, I tend to get lyrical in the wee hours of the morning. Anyhow, Anderson's point is well-taken: all phenomena are historical - including Marxists. We're limited by our times. We can't theorize revolutionary forces we can't see (though we have a responsibility to keep looking.)
If a religion gets persecuted, believers go underground and memorize the sacred texts. When Marxism gets persecuted, adherents lose contact with the social reality that gives life to their politics. And their politics die. Anderson lists the grim defeats Marxist movements suffered: the Russian Civil War, the defeat of the German, Italian, Hungarian and Austrian revolutions, the rise of fascism, the rise of Stalinism. Particularly in Russia, the seat of world revolution decayed:
And outside the USSR?
Marxism didn't die: it was killed. Brutal violence, in physical and psychic form, destroyed the living legacy that the First and Second Internationals so lovingly built. Marxism, as the theory of working class resistance, could not exist without that resistance, and bled to death on the streets of Hamburg and the steppes of Siberia. This is the ghost which Western Marxism took for a living human being.
Whoa, I think I'll stop there. I've left out lots on the Second International, and details of the various theories - feel free to fill up the comment box. I'll arbitrarily designate Nathaniel as the next host, Saturday, July 29th (or Sunday, given my late-night precedent.) Unless Nathaniel objects, in which case someone should volunteer in the next day or so. Thanks for reading and participating.
A few ground rules:1) I think this should be our responses to the reading - what we think is important, what struck our interest. Summaries are useful if they help illustrate a point, but I don't want anyone to feel pressured to give one.
2) I'd suggest that we keep our intertextual references to a minimum. The point here is to engage with what Anderson is saying, and, I suppose, what the Marxists he talks about are saying. But not what Zizek or Spivak or Haraway might say, lovely though those folks are.
3) Anyone who's not reading the book is welcome to ask questions. But reading the book helps.
So, without further ado: Chapter One: The Classical Tradition
Anderson gives a very brief history of the first 50 years of Marxism. It would do great violence to the richest period in Marxist thought, to claim he's summarizing it in 24 pages. Rather, he's sketching its outline, in order to make a central point: Marxism is historical.
This doesn't mean Marxism and its insights are over, but that it has a context. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky may have been brilliant, but they weren't prophets, holders of received wisdom they occasionally let fall from their lips. They were products of their time, and to fully understand their contributions, we have to understand how they lived. What Marxism did for history, science and politics, Anderson is doing for Marxism. He's taking it out of the realm of ideology, of ideas that exist outside of the humans that created them. He's doing a basic historical materialist analysis - of historical materialism.
And what was that context? I've got three points to make.
1) Marxists are activists
Marx may have wrote Capital Volume One in the library, and he had a PhD, but he wasn't an academic. He fought on the barricades of the failed German revolution in 1848. He spent much time helping found the First International, and intervened actively in its debates. He wrote impassioned journalism defending the Paris Commune.
Showing off? - a Trotsky montage from an early Soviet poster
Lenin lived much of his life in exile, and all his writings were geared towards a single question: revolutionary strategy. He was a Bolshevik party leader, not an idle propagandist. Even when he wrote The Development of Capitalism in Russia, a detailed economic treatise, it was to discern how capitalism worked in Russia, and therefore what the proper revolutionary strategy should be in response.
Trotsky's writings on permanent revolution were a brilliant response to the 1905 Revolution. His later works on art and culture responded to the ferment of post-revolutionary Russia.
Anderson lists others. The point is that none of the 'greats', from Luxemburg to Hilferding, wrote for any other question than Lenin's famous, still-relevant slap in the face to the apathetic and abstract: what must be done? How do we achieve socialism? That's a huge question, and one that can only be answered by breaking it down into smaller parts. But it was the starting point that animated the birth of revolutionary Marxism. These Marxists were far removed from the stuffy, crumbs-in-the-beard image foisted on Marxists today. They were young - all of them wrote their major theoretical works before they were 30. They were angry: Lenin's brother was executed by the Russian regime for trying to assassinate the Tsar. And they were committed, active revolutionaries.
Did it have anything to do with going prematurely bald? - Lenin as a young man
2) Marxism is a product of its time
People ask, "Why didn't Marx come up with a political programme?" It's a fair point; you can point them to the Communist Manifesto, and that's a fine document, but there's little practical advice on what to do, and some stuff about 'holding the bourgeoisie's wives in common' that's easily misinterpreted. Why didn't Marx write more? Anderson answers,
Marx left behind him a coherent and developed economic theory of the capitalist mode of production, set out in Capital, but no comparable political theory of the straucture of the bourgeois state, or of the strategy and tactics of revolutionary socialist struggle by a working-class party for its overthrow... In this respect, Marx's work could not outrun the real historical pace of the masses, in the invention of their own instruments and modalities of self-emancipation.Marx couldn't write politics, because he didn't see any politics around him. He grasped whatever appeared - part of his brilliance was recognizing the Paris Commune as the first glimmerings of a socialist society. But even the Commune, as Anderson points out, was fought for by artisans, not by a working class that had barely begun its existence in Marx's day.
Liberte doesn't seem that into it
Marx was scathing with those who create revolutionary plans for the working class. He had no time for elitists, dreamers or utopians; if your politics didn't come from the struggles of real people, then you had no business telling real people how to do politics. For Marx, the best way to help the struggle was to discover the laws of motion of capitalist society. Capital Vol. 1 wasn't an intellectual exercise, but an intervention in the struggle. It was 'all' he could do, because it was all history had shown him.
Anderson subjects Lenin to the same scrutiny. Lenin's limitations
were all basically related to the particular backwardness of the Russian social formation... Lenin, far more deeply rooted in a national workers' movement than Marx had ever been, was not directly concerned with the necessarily distinct framework of struggle elsewhere in the continent, which was to make the road to revolution qualitatively more difficult than in Russia itself.Lenin was an amazing leader because his questions were practical: he understood the Russian scene better than anyone else, because of his deeply-rooted Marxism. But that meant he couldn't discern what would happen, if the Russian Revolution failed.
Right side of history, wrong end of the rifle - Bolshevik soldier about to be shot by the Whites
3) Marxists got the shit kicked out of them
Sorry, I tend to get lyrical in the wee hours of the morning. Anyhow, Anderson's point is well-taken: all phenomena are historical - including Marxists. We're limited by our times. We can't theorize revolutionary forces we can't see (though we have a responsibility to keep looking.)
If a religion gets persecuted, believers go underground and memorize the sacred texts. When Marxism gets persecuted, adherents lose contact with the social reality that gives life to their politics. And their politics die. Anderson lists the grim defeats Marxist movements suffered: the Russian Civil War, the defeat of the German, Italian, Hungarian and Austrian revolutions, the rise of fascism, the rise of Stalinism. Particularly in Russia, the seat of world revolution decayed:
The consolidation of a bureaucratically privileged stratum above the working class was secured by a police regime of ever intensifying ferocity. In these conditions, the revolutionary unity of theory and practice that had made possible classical Bolshevism was ineluctably destroyed.
And outside the USSR?
Social counter-revolution now mobilized in its most brutal and violent forms, abolishing parliamentary democracy in country after country, to eliminate all autonomous organizations of the working class.Under these conditions, how could Marxism survive? As a practice, it dwindled; its remaining adherents devoted themselves to economic treatises. As a political theory, it faded into the background (with the notable exception of Trotsky, who was assassinated for his troubles.)
Marxism didn't die: it was killed. Brutal violence, in physical and psychic form, destroyed the living legacy that the First and Second Internationals so lovingly built. Marxism, as the theory of working class resistance, could not exist without that resistance, and bled to death on the streets of Hamburg and the steppes of Siberia. This is the ghost which Western Marxism took for a living human being.
Whoa, I think I'll stop there. I've left out lots on the Second International, and details of the various theories - feel free to fill up the comment box. I'll arbitrarily designate Nathaniel as the next host, Saturday, July 29th (or Sunday, given my late-night precedent.) Unless Nathaniel objects, in which case someone should volunteer in the next day or so. Thanks for reading and participating.
