In the Tracks of Historical Materialism - Perry Anderson

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in any responsible accounting of the development of historical materialism as a theory — in this respect, the very reverse of the order of priorities in Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature, in which ‘intrinsic’ prevailed over ‘extrinsic’ approaches.8 But at the same time, precisely because of all the distance that separates Marx from Mannheim (or his modern successors), such an accounting must also confront the internal obstacles, aporias, blockages of the theory in its own attempt to approximate to a general truth of the time. A purely reductive history of Marxism, flattening it out on the anvil of world politics, contradicts the nature of its object. There were socialists before Marx: the scandal he introduced, which still affronts many socialists — not to speak of capitalists — today, was the aspiration towards a scientific socialism: that is, one governed by rationally controllable criteria of evidence and truth. An internal history, of cognitive blindnesses and impediments, as well as advances or insights, is essential to a real scrutiny of the fortunes of Marxism in these past years, as of other ones. Without that, the stringency of genuine self-criticism would be absent: the recourse to the wider movement of history would tend to slip away from, or beyond, material explanation to intellectual exemption or exculpation.

      Let us now pass to the matters in hand. The configuration of Western Marxism that held for so long after the victory and isolation of the Russian Revolution was — as I tried to describe it — fundamentally the product of the repeated defeats of the labour movement in the strongholds of advanced capitalism in continental Europe, after the first breakthrough by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Those defeats came in three waves: first, the proletarian insurgency in Central Europe immediately after the First World War — in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy — was beaten back between 1918 and 1922, so that fascism emerged triumphant in all these countries within a decade. Second, the Popular Fronts of the late thirties, in Spain and France, were undone with the fall of the Spanish Republic and the collapse of the Left in France that paved the way for Vichy two years later. Finally, the Resistance movements, led by mass Communist and Socialist parties, sputtered out across Western Europe in 1945-46, unable to translate their ascendancy in the armed struggle against Nazism into any durable political hegemony thereafter. The long post-war boom then gradually and inexorably subordinated labour to capital within the stabilized parliamentary democracies and emergent consumer societies of the OECD order.

      It was within this overall set of historical coordinates that a new kind of Marxist theory crystallized. In the East, Stalinism was consolidated in the USSR. In the West, the oldest and largest capitalist societies in the world persisted undisturbed by any revolutionary challenges from below, in Britain and the United States. Between these two flanks, a post-classical form of Marxism flourished in those societies where the labour movement was strong enough to pose a genuine revolutionary threat to capital, incarnating a mass political practice that formed the necessary horizon of all socialist thought, yet was not strong enough actually to overthrow capital — undergoing, on the contrary, successive and radical defeats at each critical testing-point. Germany, Italy and France were the three major countries where Western Marxism found its homelands in the five decades between 1918 and 1968. The nature of this Marxism could not but bear the impress of the disasters that accompanied and surrounded it. Above all, it was marked by the sundering of the bonds that should have linked it to a popular movement for revolutionary socialism. These had existed at the outset, as the careers of its trio of founding fathers show — Lukács, Korsch and Gramsci, each an active leader and organizer in the communist movement in his own country in the aftermath of the First World War. But as these pioneers ended in exile or prison, theory and practice drifted fatally apart, under the pressure of the time. The sites of Marxism as a discourse gradually became displaced from trade unions and political parties to research institutes and university departments. Inaugurated with the rise of the Frankfurt School in the late twenties and early thirties, the change was virtually absolute by the period of the High Cold War in the fifties, when there was scarcely a Marxist theoretician of any weight who was not the holder of a chair in the academy, rather than a post in the class struggle.

      This shift of institutional terrain was reflected in an alteration of intellectual focus. Where Marx had successively moved from philosophy to politics to economics in his own studies, Western Marxism inverted his route. Major economic analyses of capitalism, within a Marxist framework, largely petered out after the Great Depression; political scanning of the bourgeois state dwindled away after the silencing of Gramsci; strategic discussion of the roads to a realizable socialism disappeared almost entirely. What increasingly took their place was a revival of philosophical discourse proper, itself centred on questions of method — that is, more epistemological than substantive in character. In this respect, Korsch’s work of 1923, Marxism and Philosophy, proved prophetic. Sartre, Adorno, Althusser, Marcuse, Della Volpe, Lukács, Bloch and Colletti all produced major syntheses essentially focused on problems of cognition, however dialectically reformulated, written in an idiom of forbidding technical difficulty. For their purposes, each had recourse to philosophical legacies anterior to Marx himself: Hegel, Spinoza, Kant, Kierkegaard, Schelling or others. At the same time, each school within Western Marxism developed in close contact, often quasi-symbiosis, with coeval intellectual systems of a non-Marxist character; borrowing concepts and themes from Weber in the case of Lukács, Croce in the case of Gramsci, Heidegger in the case of Sartre, Lacan in the case of Althusser, Hjelmslev in that of Della Volpe, and so on. The patterning of this series of lateral relationships to bourgeois culture, alien to the tradition of classical Marxism, was itself a function of the dislocation of the relationships that had once held between it and the practice of the workers’ movement. The lapse of these latter in turn inflected the whole Western Marxist tradition towards a subjacent pessimism, exhibited in the very innovations which it brought to the thematic range of historical materialism — whether in Sartre’s theory of the logic of scarcity, Marcuse’s vision of social one-dimensionality, Althusser’s insistence on the permanence of ideological illusion, Benjamin’s fear of the confiscation of the history of the past, or even Gramsci’s own bleak stoicism.

      At the same time, within its newly constricted parameters, the brilliance and fertility of this tradition were by any standards remarkable. Not merely did Marxist philosophy achieve a general plateau of sophistication far beyond its median levels of the past; but the major exponents of Western Marxism also typically pioneered studies of cultural processes — in the higher ranges of the superstructures—as if in glittering compensation for their neglect of the structures and infrastructures of politics and economics. Above all, art and ideology were the privileged terrain of much of this tradition, sounded by thinker after thinker with an imagination and precision that historical materialism had never deployed here before. In the final days of Western Marxism, one can, indeed, speak of a veritable hypertrophy of the aesthetic — which came to be surcharged with all the values that were repressed or denied elsewhere in the atrophy of living socialist politics: utopian images of the future, ethical maxims for the present, were displaced and condensed into the vaulting meditations on art with which Lukács or Adorno or Sartre concluded much of their life’s work.

      Still, whatever the outer limits of the tradition represented by theorists like these, in and through its very distance from immediate political practice it remained proof against any temptations to compromise with the established order. Western Marxism as a whole refused any reformist compact. The soil from which it arose was one in which mass Communist parties commanded the allegiance of the vanguard of the working class in the major countries of continental Europe — parties which by the late twenties were at once intransigent foes of capital, and Stalinized structures that permitted no serious discussion or dissent on major political issues, debarring in advance any revolutionary circuit between theory and practice. In these conditions, some of the major minds of Western Marxism — Lukács, Althusser, Della Volpe — chose to remain formal members of their respective parties, while developing as far as they could a discourse remote from official dogmas, in coded opposition to them. Others, like Sartre, attempted to theorize the practice of these parties from a position outside them. Others again, like Adorno in post-war Germany, abstained from any direct relationship to politics whatsoever. But none of these capitulated to the status quo, or ever embellished it, through the worst years of the Cold War.

      This long and tantalizing

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