Welcome to the 3rd edition of the reading group on Perry Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism. I think we deserve a collective pat on the back for the quality and level of the feedback so far. In truth, I've never seen this sort of thing before on the net: a critical discussion on a Marxist text that neither eulogizes nor condemns.

By the way, did you know the picture of "Considerations" in the side bar is the only English one on the net? I scanned it myself, because google and the bookstore sites don't have one. I like NLB editions: they have amazing colour schemes and use white space well.

Chapter 3 - Formal Shifts

Chapter 3 is where the gloves come off. Anderson digs into the historical legacy of Western Marxism (WM) and finds some disturbing precedents. As people have mentioned in the discussion, Anderson is busy contextualizing Marxism, so we have to contextualize Anderson. A comrade told me that WM was reaching new heights of popularity in 1974, bringing it into direct competition with 'political Marxism' - an independent current focused outside the universities on workplace and community struggles. Anderson challenged the 'academic turn' by reminding WMers that they came from somewhere and, whether they knew it or not, their background influenced where they were going.



Anderson's well-placed to make this assessment. He knows a lot about history, philosophy and politics. As he suggests:

it is perfectly evident that each individual system in this [WM] tradition has received the impress of a plurality of determinations, deriving from different horizons and levels of the social and ideological structures of its own time and the past, producing a wide heterogeneity of theories... in any balance-sheet of the record of Western Marxism, the development of new concepts or emergence of new themes provides the most critical gauge of its nature and power as a tradition. (74)

He's not condemning WM completely, rhetorical flourishes aside. He's saying it's long overdue for a critical assessment.


It's OK, we already have all the answers!

As Anderson showed in chapter 2, the Marxist tradition suffered an historical defeat as its base, the international workers' movement, fell under the combined assault of fascism and Stalinism. This had a huge impact on both the focus and careers of Marxists:

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. The most striking single fact about the whole tradition from Lukasc to Althusser, Korsch to Colleti, is the overwhelming predominance of professional philosophers in it. (49)

This is in contrast to earlier generations, who "typically taught at party or voluntary schools for workers, as one activity among others in a life of militancy." Now there were no democratic parties or independent schools, and while there certainly was militancy, it was harder to find. The turn to philosophy was always a possibility in Marxism: "this shift could never have occurred so generally and drastically, if there had not been a powerful internal determinant at work within Marxist culture itself as well."


But where are the Marxists?

Anderson goes on to trace the history of the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx's early works of philosophy, and how they influenced successive generations of Western Marxists. This stood Marx's own development on its head:

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 economics and politics to philosophy - abandoning direct engagement with what had been the great concerns of the mature Marx. (52)

The Western Marxists sought source material for a theory of knowledge. They never said so openly,

[b]ut the common assumption of virtually all was that the preliminary task of theoretical research within Marxism was to disengage the rules of social enquiry discovered by Marx, yet buried within the topical particularity of his work, and if necessary to complete them. The result was that a remarkable amount of the output of Western Marxism became a prolonged and intricate Discourse on Method. (53)

Epistemology replaced praxis, and bourgeois culture replaced the workers' movement as a pole of attraction. Worse, it wasn't just any bourgeois culture, but the existing, idealist currents of philosophy - a world view where ideas create matter, and not the other way around.


I've got way too much on my mind for Marxism - Nietzsche by Edward Munch

This is where Anderson shines: in 20 pages, he traces the bourgeois roots of every major WM thinker. Marxists who claimed to renew or expand Marxism, did so by importing idealist thinkers into the tradition. Bachelard and Freud inspired Sartre, Marcuse and Althusser. Hegel inspired Lukacs, Marcuse and Adorno. Colletti drew Marx's roots back to Kant, while Della Volpe chose Rousseau. Lefebvre, Adorno and Horkheimer used Schelling; Adorno, Sartre, Marcuse and Althusser drew on Nietzsche. Even Gramsci, who was a professional revolutionary, not an academic, looked back to Croce and Machiavelli.

You might ask: so what? What's wrong with those people? The problem is that Marxism is a materialist philosophy: ideas and systems come from human activity and history. Marx began as a Hegelian, and developed Hegel's dialectic, but created a thoroughly materialist version, his last words on the topic being the famous Theses on Feuerbach (which are really short, if you want to check them out.) However, he never created a systematic philosophy. Engels, who tried to update it, was rejected by Korsch and Lukacs. This left a gaping hole.


The ribbon's been cut

Anderson doesn't reject the philosophical project: he argues Marx never "surpassed" bourgeois achievements in ethics, aesthetics or other philosophical issues. Thus there was

a certain legitimacy in the successive attempts made within Western Marxism to establish an intellectual ancestry reaching back behind Marx. For any creative development of Marxist philosophy as such would inevitably have had to move through a reconsideration of the complex cognitive history which Marx himself ignored or bypassed. (61)

But that carried risks: pre, or anti-Marxist philosophies carried a "weight of idealist or religious motifs within them". Those motifs were repeated, not just in the content of WM, but its very form.

Without a materialist tradition to draw on, WM engaged with idealism in a much more systematic matter: "This constant concourse with contemporary thought-systems outside historical materialism, often avowedly antagonistic to it, was something unknown to Marxist theory before the First World War." (58) The new tradition of WM looked outside and before Marx, because they wanted to create an intellectual ancestry for him - a "compulsive" concern for a "prior vantage point" that Anderson says "was once again a suggestive index of the basic historical situation of Western Marxism." (59)


Despite their differences, Western Marxists have a lot in common

This is not to say WM formed a coherent, unbroken tradition. Its exponents fought each other viciously: Sartre vs. Lukacs, Adorno vs. Sartre; Althusser vs. nearly everyone. Anderson traces the internecine disagreements in fascinating detail; since I'm not acquainted with the debates, I can't do them justice here - I encourage everyone to check out pages 56-74. But the 'white thread' tying them together was their roots in idealist philosophy. That idealism precluded the WMers from seeing their tradition as just that: a tradition, related to one another by a shared heritage. Anderson comments on how little the different thinkers actually engaged with one another:

Astonishingly, within the entire corpus of Western Marxism, there is not one single serious appraisal or sustained critique of the work of one major theorist by another, revealing close textual knowledge or minimal analytic care in its treatment. At most, there are cursory aspersions or casual commendations, both equally ill-read and superficial. (69)

Had WM tried to discover its own laws of motion, it would have seen its commonalities and treated its thinkers with more respect. But that would require going beyond the ideas themselves, to an historical materialist grounding of WM itself.


Them's fightin' words!

Anderson is, I suppose, open to the charge that he's casting "cursory aspersions" too. But despite his tone, I don't think he's like that obnoxious guy in the back of the class who just says everything sucks. I see his task as a critique from the inside. He's read their work, he's familiar with the debates, and he's trying to do what WMers forgot: contextualise their own work. That can only happen with an awareness of history, politics and yes, philosophy.

But his tone reflects something, and I think this is what gets people's backs up. He's 'privileging' second generation Marxists. Trotsky, Lenin and Luxemburg came up with more useful material for two, equally important reasons: 1) they had a far better context to work in, and 2) they understood Marxism as a political project, not simply an explanatory one. Marxism has lost vitality as a result.

I find him convincing. It probably helps that I come from the 'political' Marxist tradition, and that I have no particular affiliation to any of the Western Marxists he mentions. And believe it or not, I'm not hostile to the latter; academic Marxism isn't the enemy any more than postmodernism is: the enemy is capitalism, and the question is how to fight it. (Besides, some of my best friends are philosophers!) Philosophy has a lot to teach us - and I think Anderson knows this, otherwise he wouldn't have read all those philosophy books in the first place. I think he's simply trying to reorient Marxism towards a strategic focus - in reminding us of how WM has backgrounded that question, Anderson does us a service.

Good things to discuss

1) Is Anderson wrong? How would WM respond to his charges?
2) Is Anderson right but mislaying the blame? Should we be talking more about circumstances e.g. the Nazis shutting down the Frankfurt School?
3) Is Anderson correct, and we need to critically evaluate WM on those terms? What other terms could we add to his critique?
4) What about us? In the discussion, BettySparks raised the question of how much impact the absence of a workers' movement actually had. After all, we're not living through a mass struggle; there's no country in the world that faces even a pre-revolutionary situation (in the Marxist, not temporal sense.) - well, maybe Nepal, but unless you're the RCP that's a hard example to follow. According to Anderson's criteria, we're at severe risk of bourgeois-itis. Can we even claim to be good Marxists?


One of Western Marxism's accomplishments is an updated critique of alienation

As a preliminary response to No.4, I think it's a risk. Not in the Maoist sense - 'bourgeois ideology invading our oh-so-proletarian consciousness' - but in the sense of reduced possibilities restricting our understanding of capitalism - and Marxism - as a system. It's one of the reasons I think studying revolutionary history is so important: to give us a sense of what the working class can accomplish when it's not beaten into submission. Yet that doesn't solve the problem: comrades have taken me up for being too dismissive of current struggles, and rightly so. If you spend too much much reading history, very little in the present measures up. When I learnt that, 100 years ago in the streets of my fair city, working people in their thousands were fist-fighting police to support a strike, it makes a demo of a few hundred seem awfully small. Too much history makes me lose a concrete sense of the present.

This is the tension between pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will, and it's where I'll end - in fact, with another question:

5) What can we take from Western Marxism to help us fight the class war?

La lutta continua, companeras y companeros.