In the Tracks of Historical Materialism

The Wellek Library Lectures

Perry Anderson

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780860917762
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784787905
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Historiography

What have been the major changes in the intellectual landscape of the left since the mid seventies? Have they on balance represented an emancipation or a retreat for socialist culture as a whole? In the Tracks of Historical Materialism looks at some of the paradoxes in the evolution of Marxist thought in this period. It starts by considering the remarkable and variegated growth of historical materialism in the Anglo-American world, spreading across a broad field from history to economics, politics to literature, sociology to philosophy. By contrast, the same years have seen a drastic recession of Marxist influences in the Latin cultures where it was traditionally strong-France or Italy. Its main theoretical challengers there proved to be successive forms of structuralism and post-structuralism. The common coordinates of these-tracing the outer bounds of the work of Levi-Strauss or Lacan, Foucault or Derrida-are surveyed and criticized, in the light of the inherent limitations of the language model from which they derived. In Germany, on the other hand, the theoretical scene has been largely dominated by the accumulating work of Habermas, with its roots in the Frankfurt School. Yet Habermas's philosophy also reveals unexpected affinities with the trend of prevalent Parisian concerns, in its unifying emphasis on communication-while at the same time diverging from them in the constancy of its political commitments. The historical background of international class struggles against which these variant fates of Marxism in the West were played out is then explored, with special attention to the interconnection between the destinies of Maoism and Eurocommunism. What, finally, is the nature of the relationship between Marxism as a theory and socialism as a goal? A conclusion reviews the wider issues posed for the labour movement by the rise of the peace movement and the women's movement, and suggests a range of priorities for the further development of Marxist thought in the eighties.

1
Prediction and
Performance

The term ‘critical theory’, which brings us here tonight, contains its own peculiar, if productive, ambiguities. Theory, in the first instance, of what? Usages oscillate between two main poles: of literature, most familiarly, as the name and collection which we are honouring remind us. But also of society, as a less widespread but more polemical and pointed tradition would have it. In this second version, the two words that make up the formula often acquire capital letters, as the token of their diacritical distance from the first. The other component of the term raises similar questions. What sort of criticism is being theorized? From what ground, and on what principles? A broad range of possible stances are at stake here, as this series itself, in its catholicity, makes plain. In practice, the very variety of positions within literary criticism, with the attendant attritions and collisions between them, has always tended to implicate the literary with the social, as readers of René Wellek’s own History of Criticism will be aware. The compulsive connection between the two has often been attested even by those who have most strenuously repudiated the notion of ‘theory’ itself. Criticism of literature, Leavis after all proclaimed, is ‘criticism of life’. This involuntary movement, stated or suggested, from the literary to the social has not so generally been reversed in a movement from the social to the literary. The reasons are not hard to seek. For literary criticism, whether ‘practical’ or ‘theoretical’, is typically just that, criticism — its irrepressibly evaluative impulse spontaneously tending to transgress the frontiers of the text towards the associated life beyond it. Social theory as such paradoxically lacks a comparable discriminatory charge built into it. The mainstream action theory that dominated North American sociology for so long is a case close to hand. Whereas most theories of literature propose, directly or obliquely, some discourse on society, the theories of society that contain, even indirectly, a discourse on literature are relatively few. It is difficult to imagine a Parsonian poetics; but it is easy enough to discern a sociology or a history at work in the New Criticism.

The critical theory which I am going to discuss is in this respect an exception. Marxism falls, of course, massively and pre-eminently into the category of those systems of thought concerned with the nature and direction of society as a whole. It has also, however, unlike most of its rivals in this field, developed an extensive discourse on literature in this century. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them is no doubt to be found in the very intransigence of the critique which the founders of historical materialism made of the capitalist order in which they lived. Radically and inexpugnably critical in outlook from the start, Marxism was carried swiftly by its own impetus, as it were, onto the terrain of literary criticism. Marx’s correspondence with Lassalle shows how natural this movement was, in its inaugural gesture. This is not to say that there was any easy concord between social and literary discourses within Marxism, then or later. On the contrary, the record of their relations has been a complex, tense and uneven one, riven by multiple breaks, displacements and deadlocks. If no complete rupture has ever occurred, since the days more or less of Mehring, it is doubtless due to the fact that beyond their common critical starting-point, there has always been an ultimate historical line of flight along the horizon of each. It is not entirely fortuitous, then, that the contemporary locution ‘critical theory’ should have two dominant connotations: on the one hand a generalized body of theory about literature, on the other a particular corpus of theory about society descending from Marx. It is the latter that customarily acquires capitals, a shift into upper case essentially effected by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s. Horkheimer, who codified this sense in 1937, intended to recover with it the sharp philosophical edge of Marx’s materialism, unduly blunted — as his generation saw it — by the heritage of the Second International. Politically, Horkheimer declared, the ‘only concern’ of the critical theorist was to ‘accelerate a development that should lead to a society without exploitation’.¹ Intellectually, however, he sought – in Adorno’s later words – ‘to make men theoretically conscious of what it is that distinguishes materialism’.² The main thrust of the Frankfurt School’s interventions over the years lay in just this direction — a long and passionate critical elucidation of the bequests and contradictions of classical philosophy and its contemporary successors, one which led increasingly, over the years, towards the domains of literature and art in the work of Adorno or Marcuse, each of whom brought their careers to rest in the realm of aesthetics. Still, to define Marxism as a critical theory simply in terms of the goal of a classless society, or the procedures of a consciously materialist philosophy, is obviously insufficient. The real propriety of the term for Marxism lies elsewhere.

What is distinctive about the kind of criticism that historical materialism in principle represents, is that it includes, indivisibly and unremittingly, self-criticism. That is, Marxism is a theory of history that lays claim, at the same stroke, to provide a history of the theory. A Marxism of Marxism was inscribed in its charter from the outset, when Marx and Engels defined the conditions of their own intellectual discoveries as the emergence of the determinate class contradictions of capitalist society itself, and their political objectives not merely as ‘an ideal state of affairs’, but as borne by the ‘real movement of things’. This conception involved no element of complacent positivity — as if truth were henceforward guaranteed by time, Being by Becoming, their doctrine immune from error by mere immersion in change. ‘Proletarian revolutions,’ wrote Marx, ‘criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them.’³ Two generations later Karl Korsch was the first to apply this revolutionary self-criticism to the development of Marxism since the heady days of 1848, distinguishing — as he put it — ‘three major stages through which Marxist theory has passed since its birth — inevitably so in the context of the concrete social development of this epoch.’⁴ These words were written in 1923. Without being altogether aware of it, their author was with them ushering in a fourth stage in the history of Marxist theory — one whose final shape was to be far from his expectations and hopes at the time. I have myself tried to explore something of what that shape proved to be, in an essay on the course and pattern of Western Marxism from the aftermath of the First World War to the end of the long boom that followed the Second World War — the half-century between 1918 and 1968.⁵ That survey, written in the mid-seventies, included a diagnosis and some predictions. It sketched a provisional balance-sheet of a long period that seemed to be drawing to a close, and suggested other directions in which Marxist theory would or should move, in a new setting. A major purpose of these lectures will be to measure the accuracy of the analysis and the anticipations of that text, in the light of subsequent developments.

Before this task is tackled, however, it is necessary to make a preliminary observation. I have said that Marxism lies apart from all other variants of critical theory in its ability — or at least ambition — to compose a self-critical theory capable of explaining its own genesis and metamorphoses. This peculiarity needs some further specifications, however. We do not expect physics or biology to provide us with the concepts necessary to think their emergence as a science. Another vocabulary, anchored in a context that is conventionally distinguished as one of ‘discovery’ rather than ‘validation’, is needed for that purpose. To be sure, the principles of intelligibility of the history of these sciences are not simply external to them. On the contrary, the paradox is that, once constituted, they typically achieve a relatively high degree of immanent evolution, regulated by the respective problems posed within each and by their successive resolutions. What Georges Canguilhem, himself a historian of the life sciences conspicuously committed to the study of the ‘normative’ social dimensions impinging on them, nevertheless does not hesitate to call their common ‘axiological activity, the quest for truth’,⁶ acts as an internal regulator increasingly, if far from completely, insulating them from a sheerly external order of determinations in cultural or political history. One might say that although the origins of the natural sciences escape their own theoretical field entirely, the further they develop the less need they have of any other theoretical field to explain their development. The institutionalized ‘quest for truth’, and the structure of problems set by the governing paradigm, suffice in predominant measure to account for their growth. Canguilhem, like Lakatos in the Anglo-Saxon philosophy of science, affirms in this sense the priority of the internal history of the concepts of the natural sciences, in their sequence of derivations, ruptures and transformations. For Canguilhem, their external history, always present, typically becomes causally crucial only at the junctures when ‘normal’ progress falters.

By contrast, disciplines like literary studies — traditionally described as the humanities — have rarely made any claim to cumulative rational progress of this sort. They fall subject to the same kind of external determinations in their origins, but never elude them in the same way thereafter. In other words, they possess neither axiological stability derived from the autonomy of the veridical, nor self-reflexive mobility capable of explaining their changing patterns of enquiry in terms of their own concepts. One discipline that explicitly sought to do the latter was, of course, the sociology of knowledge developed by Scheler and Mannheim. But its effort over-reached itself, ending in a relativism that effectively denied any cognitive validity to the ideologies or utopias it dismantled, thereby undermining its own pretensions. ‘The “all” of the indiscriminately total concept of ideology,’ Adorno remarked, ‘terminates in nothingness. Once it has ceased to differ from any true consciousness it is no longer fit to criticize a false one.’⁷ He rightly insisted that the dividing-line separating any such sociology of knowledge from historical materialism was the ‘idea of objective truth’. We shall see the surprising importance of this apparently innocuous commonplace tomorrow. For the moment, it is merely necessary to point out that the protocols for a Marxist reflection on Marxism must therefore be twofold. On the one hand, the destiny of historical materialism in any given period must first of all be situated within the intricate web of national and international class struggles which characterize it, and whose course its own instruments of thought are designed to capture. Marxist theory, bent on understanding the world, has always aimed at an asymptotic unity with a popular practice seeking to transform it. The trajectory of the theory has thus always been primarily determined by the fate of that practice. Any report on the Marxism of the past decade will inevitably, then, be in the first instance a political history of its external environment. Parodying the slogan of the German historical school of Ranke, one might speak of a permanent Primat der Aussenpolitik 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 dw...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Prediction and Performance
• 2. Structure and Subject
• 3. Nature and History
• Postscript
• Index