[13 January, 2001]
One the one hand, ‘abstract’ general models are constructed, or presupposed [...] without concern for their effective variations; on the other hand, ‘concrete’ local cases are explored without reference to their reciprocal implications and interconnections. The conventional dichotomy between these processes derives, doubtless, from the widespread belief that an intelligible necessity only inhabits the broadest and most general trends in history, which operate so to speak ‘above’ the multiple empirical circumstances of specific events and institutions, whose actual course and shape becomes by comparison largely the outcome of chance. Scientific laws—if the notion of them is accepted at all—are held to obtain only for universal categories: singular objects are deemed the domain of the fortuitous. The practical consequences of this are to render general concepts [...] so remote from historical reality that they cease to have any explicative power at all; while particular studies [...] fail vice versa to develop or refine any global theory. The premise of this work is that there is no plumb-line between necessity and contingency in historical explanation dividing separate types of enquiry—‘long run’ versus ‘short run’ or ‘abstract’ versus ‘concrete’—from each other. There is merely that which is known—established by historical research—and that which is not known: the latter may be either the mechanisms of single events or the laws of motion of whole structures. Both are equally amenable, in principle, to adequate knowledge of their causality. [...] One of the main purposes of the study undertaken here is thus to try to hold together in tension two orders of reflection which have often been unwarrantably divorced in Marxist writing, weakening its capacity for rational and controllable theory in the domain of history.[1]
At some point in the early 1990s I read Perry Anderson’s essay ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’. [2] I can remember it having a profound effect on me. What Anderson had argued (the essay was written in 1964) was that, contrary to the accepted historical wisdom of both the right and the left, what typified British society was its relative backwardness—social, political, cultural—and what explained British backwardness was a premature and backward seventeenth-century bourgeois revolution. British historical development was, in this respect, cast as unique within Europe. Anderson followed ‘Origins’ in the 1960s with further essays pointing up the consequences of British cultural and political backwardness; along with essays by Tom Nairn pursuing a similar vein, their central conclusions are what has come to be known as the ‘Nairn-Anderson Theses’. These ideas seemed to me at the time to explain so clearly the nature of contemporary British reality that Anderson’s basic framework marked my thinking on British politics and history from that point on.
However. Upon reflection, it became apparent to me that underlying the structure of this argument were a series of historical and theoretical assumptions which were in need of a good deal of further investigation and elaboration if they were not to be classified as dogmatic. First, the argument is dependent upon the acknowledgement of some kind of generalised pattern of bourgeois revolution—or at least of one paradigm case against which English exceptionalism can be compared and evaluated; the contours of this necessary controlling paradigm, however, is never spelled out explicitly, and can be deduced only by comparison with the concrete case in question, an outline of what it is not. Second, the particular form of the bourgeois revolution in the English case is accorded a decisive degree of explanatory weight in accounting for subsequent social and political development. Now, of course, the degree to which later events can be explained in terms of their secular antecedents is of course a central problematic of historical analysis. The problem with Anderson’s and Nairn’s argument is that it assumes a philosophical standpoint in this respect which is never explicitly acknowledged or developed. Finally—and most obviously—the whole argument is premised on an understanding of ‘bourgeois revolution’ as a valid and workable theoretical concept: that is to say, on a recognition of a set of historical events with sufficient common features that they can be organised together in a common theoretical category, and which are, logically, conceptually distinct from other historical events. What is common to the bourgeois revolutions tout court is not addressed in the articles that form the backbone of the Anderson-Nairn argument: it is as if it is assumed to be ‘obvious’.
It thus became clear to me that it would be necessary to look more closely at how the concept of the bourgeois revolution tallied with Anderson’s overall thinking.
Anderson was the leading force in the group of young turks that assumed the leadership of New Left Review in 1963. The subsequent achievement of New Left Review in opening up English speaking left intellectual circles to a Marxism relatively free from the constraints of Stalinism from this point up until fairly recently cannot be gainsaid. What was Anderson’s specific contribution within this project? In 1964, as mentioned, came ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, followed by further essays pointing up the consequences of British cultural and political backwardness. Then in 1974 came the simultaneous publication of Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, an enormous (nearly 1,000 pages combined) survey of European history covering the rise of ancient Greece to the height of the powers of the European absolutist state. The concluding section of the latter volume set out the two central themes of Anderson’s discourse: first, that ‘what rendered the unique passage to capitalism possible in Europe was the concatenation of antiquity and feudalism’, that is, that the capitalist mode of production germinated in western Europe and nowhere else because of the unique ‘perdurable inheritance of classical antiquity’ [3]; and, second, that the lack of a classical heritage in eastern Europe condemned it to a development fundamentally divergent to that experienced in the west: ‘representing distinct historical lineages from the start, the Absolutist States of Western and Eastern Europe followed divergent trajectories down to their respective conclusions [...] The consequences of the division of the continent [...] are still with us.’ [4] The introduction to this latter book also outlined the overall nature of the whole project as Anderson then saw it: couched in terms of a history of the modern state, Anderson projected a further two volumes, the third taking up where the second one left off in accounting for the European bourgeois revolutions and a fourth surveying the present-day capitalist state.
Anderson never developed the project beyond the publication of these two volumes of 1974. In 1976 he produced the essay ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’ [5], in which he developed the theme of a structural difference in the manner of bourgeois rule ‘east’ and ‘west’, and a consequent necessity of a differential socialist strategy across the two spheres [6]; Considerations on Western Marxism, written in 1974 but published, with an updated postscript, in 1976, in which Anderson surveyed the development of European Marxist thought following the drawing of the veil of Stalinism; and Arguments within English Marxism—a fine book—in 1980, in which, piece by piece, Anderson demolishes the pseudo-Marxist intellectual outlook of E P Thompson, one of his earlier critics.
In the 1976 postscript to Considerations Anderson was already expressing doubts as to some of the basic formulations of classical Marxism—specifically with reference to what he saw as omissions within the work of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky with regard to the Marxist theory of politics, an ellipse which for Anderson was to bear fruit in a catastrophist cast in later Marxism; without doubt Anderson’s doubts here coincide with the concerns expressed in ‘Antinomies’. Although Anderson’s devastating critique of Thompson in Arguments was scrupulously couched in fidelity to the canons of classical Marxism, one almost has the feeling that Anderson is more trying to convince himself rather than Thompson or the reader as to the efficacy of Marxist theory; that for him he rather tested the theory to destruction is witnessed by his In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1983), in which the rather token lip-service paid to historical materialism is strongly overcast by a treatment of French structuralism. This incipient break with Marxism was attested to all too clearly by the early 1990s with Anderson’s embrace of the neo-Weberian sociology of Michael Mann. The publication in 1992 of two collections of his writings spanning 1964 to 1992—English Questions and A Zone of Engagement—appears to be his definitive signing off from Marxism. His writings after this point have indeed verged on the incoherent, bother literally as well as intellectually, as his loss of theoretical bearing pushed his anyway rather over-wrought sentence structure and lexical extravagance beyond the limits of intelligibility. Anderson’s degeneration is all the more troubling given the heights from which he fell.
The critical point in this trajectory appears to be 1974; the works from this point to 1983 we can call, to borrow a phrase from Althusser, ‘the works of the break’, as the already accumulated contradictions in Anderson’s thought unravel. What went wrong? Since Anderson is either unwilling or unable to tell us himself, we shall have to hypothesise. I hypothesise thus. From 1964 the central organising principle in his work was the concept of the ‘normal’ bourgeois revolution and its absence on the British scene. It is this, I suspect, that led him to the Passages/Lineages project, a work, given its breathtaking range of sources, a number of years in the making. Anderson aborted the project on the verge, historically speaking, of the European bourgeois revolution: I suspect that on consideration he came to realise that the concept of the bourgeois revolution which he had embraced up to this point now revealed itself to him as misguided. Rather than go back to the beginning and re-order his concepts, to develop a new conception of the bourgeois revolution more in tune with the principle theme opened up by the Passages/Lineages project—the historical differentiation in Europe between east and west—Anderson practically abandoned fresh historical writing, and ultimately found himself breaking from Marxism. Maybe this decision was reached in part out of a disappointment with the theoretical apparatus of Marxism which seemed to be letting him down. In addition, maybe his subsequent evolution was encouraged by an extrinsic disappointment wrought by the inability of the European Trotskyist movement to capitalise on the openings created by the radicalisations of the post-1968 period: 1974 was of course both the high point and the point of reversal of this period, and while the 1974 main body of the text of Considerations was fulsome in its estimation of the growing Trotskyist movement as a potential resolution of what Anderson posited as the central weakness of post-World War Two Marxism—the forced rupture of the unity of theory and practice—the book’s 1976 postscript is stringent in its concern at the dangers of what Anderson called an unintentionally ‘activist’ reading of the main body of the text.
That not all of the above may be pure speculation on my part is evidenced in the 1992 collection English Questions, which contains a short essay, previously unpublished, but dated 1976 and cited as a ‘talk’, entitled ‘The Notion of the Bourgeois Revolution’, in which Anderson drew the conclusion that what was typical of the bourgeois revolutions was their non-typical nature and their deviation from a ‘normal’ pattern of development: ‘every one,’ he declares, ‘was a bastard birth.’ [7] I think of this essay as the preparatory first steps of the third volume of the Passages/Lineages project, the volume, of course, that never was.
But this is not to belittle Anderson’s contribution, especially that of 1974. Taken together, the Passages/Lineages project marks in my view the most important and effective intervention by a Marxist into mainstream historiography yet seen; and in good part this is so because it manages to escape the theoretical delimitations of an otherwise practically ubiquitous Stalinist historiographical orthodoxy. The questions that Anderson raises in these works are fundamental ones for Marxists today: the origins of capitalism; the nature of capitalist social and political structures in the eastern and western European sectors: key issues for those wishing to map out a revolutionary strategy today. But, as we have seen, in the body of his work lies a central contradiction: the notion of the ‘defective’ bourgeois revolution versus fundamental ‘normative’ models for historical change east and west. It is a shame that discussion of Anderson’s work on the left limits itself to other works. I suggest that a critical assessment of the problems and contradictions posed by the Passages/Lineages project would be a fundamental step forward in the necessary task of the re-establishment of a tradition of non-Stalinist Marxist historiography.
It is no accident that the terms Marxism and historical materialism are often regarded as practically interchangeable. Allowing for the fact that Marxism is at root a tool for changing the world, it is so because it is a science of the mechanisms of social change. (Science in the sense that Marx used the word: ‘All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.’) It is consequently also a science of history, and given that ascertainable historical evidence pertains solely to he past, a fundamental test of Marxism’s efficacy vis-à-vis its claim to be the key theoretical weapon in the struggle for social liberation in the future paradoxically lies in the proof of its effectiveness as a tool of historical enquiry and explanation of the past. I pose it in this way, because, contrary to common wisdom, it is a fallacy to claim that the ‘historical’ properly speaking pertains solely to the past: the present is, so to speak, merely the historical-in-formation and the future the present that is yet to come. In this way, Marxism’s pretensions with regard to the future that it seeks to bring into being is, in literal terms, truly ‘historical’, and, by the same token, the fundamental reference that the past holds for Marxism no mere contingency. Marxism is, plainly put, an effective science of history or it is nothing.
In this respect, then, how has twentieth-century Marxism measured up to these claims? Not well. It is necessary to claim here that ninety per cent of what today is labelled ‘Marxism’ is, under the influence of the semi-religious conceptions of Stalinist-manufactured ‘dialectical materialism’—in which both dialectical thinking and plain materialism are strikingly absent—for our purposes of little value. And in the vulgarisation of Marxist concepts, both the Stalinist bureaucracies of the Soviet Union and the ‘people’s democracies’ and those who operated under their political and ideological influence world-wide borrowed heavily from the mechanical and crude innovations developed under the auspices of the Second international. In this respect we can draw a line of continuity that runs from Plekhanov and Kautsky right up to Soboul, Hill and Hobsbawm in the near present, a continuity characterised by a vulgarised materialist conception of history, a national-‘Marxist’ interpretation of historical processes, and a dogmatic schematism of the prospects for future historical transformation.
Naturally, the uncritical reception of this ‘Marxism’ has not been unanimous. The Trotskyist movement itself arose on world scale as an opposition to Stalinist practice and methodology; the New Left Review project was born as an attempt at a resuscitation of theoretical Marxism; the American journal Monthly Review and its associated writers have also tried to effect a rehabilitation of Marxist concepts in the field of historical research; the early Althussarian school too engaged in a process of rethinking and reformulation of historical materialism’s core concepts; the historian E P Thompson and those who claim his mantle of ‘humanist’ Marxism—Geoff Eley, Eugene Genovese and Ronald Suny come to mind as typical—have engaged in historiographical exposition within the field of Marxism but in a manner openly hostile to dogmatism and schematism. Yet all of these projects have been unable to effect the necessary revitalisation: they have found themselves sucked back into the Stalinist miasma; or they have constructed a Marxism so gutted of its scientific premises that it retains very little that could properly be called ‘theoretical’; or, horrified at the grotesque vulgarity of the treatment of the classical Marxist historical tools at the hands of Stalinist or Stalinist-inspired historiography they have thrown the proverbial baby out with the unedifying water of vulgar materialist dogma and abandoned Marxism in its entirety.
In good part this collective failure lies in the fact that, despite best intentions, each intervention was blind to the fact that it was precisely the pernicious influence of Stalinism on Marxism that was at the root of the prevailing ills. For the Trotskyist movement, purported to be the linear continuation of the theory and practice of Marx and Lenin, came to see itself as but one critical component within a broader ‘Marxist’ continuity. Thus the Trotskyist tradition has defined itself not on the positions it has taken on all questions but on the positions it has taken in opposition to Stalinism. The defining features of Trotskyist Marxism are thus held to be, for example, against the idea of socialism in one country, against the two-stage theory of revolution, for inner-party democracy, and so forth. On other questions, where there has been no apparent and immediate conflict between itself and Stalinism, it has simply accepted uncritically the best of the ‘Marxism’ that was already on offer. But it forgot that ninety per cent of the Marxism on offer was tainted to a greater or lesser degree by the theoretical concepts of Stalinism. Stalinism always carried a hugely greater capacity to influence, and the truth is that Stalinist ideologies and practices never remained hermetically sealed within the governmental apparatuses of the former ‘people’s democracies’ and within the Communist Parties but rather tainted a good deal of ostensible non-Stalinist thinking and practice to a greater or lesser degree. The present ideological disorientation of present-day Trotskyism is in good part explicable by its poor standards of ideological hygiene and the considerable excess of Stalinist baggage it has unwittingly found itself carrying.
As for Anderson and the New Left Review project, the failure of the Trotskyist movement to break out of its isolation cut short the innovative attempt to refound a non-Stalinist Marxist tradition. In addition, it is noteworthy that the whole conception of ‘bureaucracy’—be it of social democratic or Stalinist origin—has formed a curious if central ellipse in his work (in this respect the political writings of his erstwhile collaborator Tom Nairn have frequently proved superior). For the current around Monthly Review, which arose in the United States in the 1940s, the stringent conditions of Cold war, McCarthyism and the arrested political development of the mature white United States working class undoubtedly inhibited a critical reception of Stalinist thought, native and external. For Thompson and those who have followed his example, their interventions have been marked by a strident rejection of concepts of classical Marxism—intemperately so in Thompson’s case—to such a degree that in place of theoretical rigour all we are left with is little more than liberal sociology. In this last case, however, the fact that horror at the consequences of the ‘Marxist voodoo’ of Stalinist thought resulted in such an unbridgeable rupture between Marxism itself and intellectuals of the calibre of Thompson indicates starkly the seriousness of the situation.
1 Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974), 7-8.
2 New Left Review 23 (January-February 1964).
3 Lineages, 420.
4 Ibid., 431.
5 New Left Review 100 (November 1976-January 1977),
6 Most clearly expressed in 1965: ‘What would an authentic mass socialist party be like today? [...] A consideration of the composition of such a party must start from a recognition of the way in which the social structures of the main West European countries have evolved [...]. It is clear that the tendency towards an ever-increasing polarisation between a small capitalist elite and a vast, destitute proletarian mass [...] has not occurred. The Leninist conception of a party was founded on this premise. The reality has, in Western Europe, been quite different and demands a different kind of party.’ ‘Problems of Socialist Strategy’, in Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn (eds.), Towards Socialism (London:, 1965, 240.
7 ‘The Notion of the Bourgeois Revolution’, in Perry Anderson, English Questions (London, 1992), 112.