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New Work on Perry Anderson
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Book
Review
Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left,
by Paul
Blackledge
(London: The Merlin Press, 2004) ISBN 0850365325
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Despite
being some rather elusive figure, Perry Anderson
is one of Britain’s most important intellectuals.
His work, spanning over four decades, represents
one of the most significant political and theoretical
contribution to Marxist theory in the English speaking
world. It is in great part due to his efforts, through
his work as editor of the New Left Review and its
publishing house Verso (formerly NLB), that the
English speaking public was introduced to the work
of thinkers like Althusser, Gramsci, Sartre, Poulantzas,
Colletti and many others; and that Britain was finally
able to have its own equivalent of Sartre’s
Les Temps Modernes. For Anderson, the purpose of
this was an attempt to place British socialist strategic
thinking on a firmer theoretical footing. Those
reasons were sufficient to convince Paul Blackledge,
an English academic whose political sympathies lie
with the Cliffite International Socialist tendency,
to write a book length study and critique of Anderson’s
thought. The book aims to trace Anderson’s
evolution from his early radicalism to his later
reformism and liberalism, make sense of it, and
immanently criticise his later trajectory and contemporary
political perspective.
Blackledge
argues that the central problematic of Anderson’s
thought revolves around the fact that all the various
strands of Marxism had at their heart a lacuna:
they contained no satisfactory theory of the modern
bourgeois state as it had evolved in the West, and
no systematic account of the nature of bourgeois
democracy. Anderson believed that it was imperative
to address this lacuna in theory and turned to this
task in order to inform revolutionary practice.
In his Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism
and Lineages of the Absolutist State, Anderson’s
most significant books according to Blackledge,
he undertook a panoramic study outlining the genealogical
underpinning of the differential development of
states West and East. Because of geographical and
temporal delineation, Russia no longer inhabited
the same conceptual framework as the West. The political
consequence of this position is that a specifically
Western strategic framework for revolutionary advance
would have to be developed, which while incorporating
insights from Lenin should also break with some
of the essential characteristics of Bolshevism.
For Blackledge, these books are “his most
influential, yet perhaps also his most flawed work”.
He outlines some of the problems of Anderson’s
analysis, and in particular its political conclusions.
He questions whether Anderson was able to adequately
articulate the distinction between the modern Western
capitalist state and the Russian state of 1917.
More importantly, he criticises Anderson’s
strategic proposals for never being posed in concrete
organisational terms. Blackledge explains that Anderson’s
failure to address this issue has weakened his contemporary
strategic orientation. Anderson’s analysis,
in spite of its strengths because of its abstract
character, is severely limited as a guide to action.
“Outside
an organisation that could test his ideas in practice,
and without the historical research necessary to
deepen them, Anderson’s insights remained formal
and abstract, with no real purchase on the actual
struggles of the proletariat.”
For
those reasons, and given that the focus of Anderson’s
work was primarily political rather than academic,
Blackledge concludes that it was “something
of a failed project”. In his influential
analysis of Western Marxism, a current he contributed
much to put on the intellectual scene, Anderson
had sharply criticised the ‘structural divorce
of theory and practice’ characteristic of that
trend of thought. For Blackledge, this ironically
equally applies to Anderson’s thought.
From
the 1980s onwards, Anderson gradually distanced
himself from Marxism. With the various defeats of
the left East and West, he came to critically accept
Fukuyama’s obituary of socialism, as no systematic
alternatives to capitalism any longer existed. In
essence he argued that social democracy could be
reinvigorated through the incorporation of the best
elements of liberalism and be given a new lease
of life in a regulated European integration. He
argued that “the parameters within which history
can turn at the present conjuncture were much more
circumscribed than Marx had anticipated: not socialism,
but more humane forms of capitalism were the only
practical alternative to triumphant neo-liberalism.”
Also, according to him, Michael Mann had a developed
analytical theory of the pattern of human development
“exceeding in explanatory ambition and empirical
detail any Marxist account”. Blackledge is
very critical of Anderson’s conclusions. If
Anderson’s position is correct, then the only
principled position to take is “stoical
opposition to capitalism”. If Anderson
is wrong, as Blackledge believes, events such as
France 1995, Seattle 1999 and Argentina in 2002
show that an alternative is possible and that “the
parameters within which history can turn at the
present conjuncture are considerably broader than
Anderson’s assessment allows.” Blackledge’s
criticism is not so much that Anderson failed to
predict those upsurges, but the fact that his analysis
provides no concepts by means of which he could
have discovered them.
Paul
Blackledge’s book is the second one to be published
on Perry Anderson’s thought. The other one,
Gregory Elliott’s Perry Anderson: The Merciless
Laboratory of History (1998) is much more comprehensive
than Blackledge’s book. As the bibliography
shows, Elliott had access to and made use of much
more material than Blackledge. Elliott's ability
to examine Anderson’s thought in its smallest
details is also difficult to rival. What is original
about Blackledge’s book is its radical political
critique of Anderson’s thought. Elliott is
too close politically to his subject to be able
to fully articulate an immanent critique of Anderson’s
ideas. Specifically, Anderson’s thought has
evolved to accept a highly pessimistic interpretation
of the contemporary political conjuncture that Elliott
broadly shares. According to Elliott, Anderson’s
political perspective in the 1990s can best be characterised
by its realism. However, for Blackledge, Elliott
is wrong as Anderson’s political reorientation
in the 1990s “was premised upon certain
contestable assumptions and let to some highly unrealistic
conclusions.” It is “unwise”
to adopt Anderson’s position: “Socialists
must reject his political perspective if they are
to avoid gross strategic errors.” Blackledge
identifies three central flaws at the core of Anderson’s
thought. First, political impressionism resulting
from an undynamic conception of the political conjuncture.
“Anderson’s use of relatively static
theoretical frameworks have hampered his elucidation
of realistic political perspectives. A consequence
of this has been that his strategic political conclusions
have been consistently impressionistic.”
He was thus too optimistic for the perspectives
for revolutionary advance in the West after 1968,
and then too dismissive of them once the left was
on the retreat. The second flaw is his pessimism
regarding working class agency. Anderson, according
to Blackledge, has a tendency to downplay the role
of workers struggle; in particular he rejects the
idea that contradictions might develop between the
consciousness of British workers and the ideology
of Labourism. The third flaw is Anderson’s
acceptance of Isaac Deutscher’s conclusion
that socialism will not necessarily come ‘from
below’ as the self-emancipation of the working
class, it can be the result of a revolution ‘from
above’. This has resulted in Anderson having
illusions about the progressive nature of the Soviet
bloc and in “transposing his conceptualisation
of the key locus of the class struggle from the
point of production to the Berlin Wall.”
It is due to those three (fatal?) flaws that, for
Blackledge, Anderson’s thought from its earliest
days was unable to account for potential challenges
and systematic alternative to capitalist modernity.
A decent intellectual biography, Blackledge’s
sharp and clear political polemic is a useful complement
to Elliott’s more comprehensive and less critical
study of Anderson’s thought.
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All
censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging
current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress
is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and
executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently
the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.
- George Bernard Shaw
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Index:
Current Articles
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