Considerations on Western Marxism
Brief thoughts on Perry Anderson’s book
By Ricardo Musse*, in The Earth is round
1.
Editor of New left-wing review and one of the main leaders of the English New Left, Perry Anderson takes stock of the Marxist tradition in Considerations on Western Marxism.
The book, written in 1974, bears the marks of the time, notably the expectation of a continuation of the revolutionary vogue initiated in May 1968, the demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the Carnation Revolution in Portugal.
This explosive situation was quickly reversed, with the predominance of capitalist stabilizing factors, considerably weakening the perspective in which the author criticizes “Western Marxism”, the oppositional variant predominant in Europe in the era of “organized capitalism”.
Perry Anderson himself, in his later writings, devoted himself to examining cultural, philosophical and aesthetic themes, thus moving closer to the approach he had condemned in European Marxism.
Historical changes in recent decades have given new importance to Considerations on Western Marxism.
The restructuring of forms of production and domination within capitalism, signs of the emergence of a new phase of this mode of production, the collapse of “state socialism”, in force in Eastern Europe, after 1989, at the same time as the hitherto predominant “Soviet Marxism” (also called “Marxism-Leninism”) was buried, have reinvigorated the aspect addressed in this book.
It is therefore as a presentation of the general coordinates of “Western Marxism” that Anderson’s book still arouses interest. Its main merit lies in its predominantly historical methodology.
Most authors who approach this lineage of Marxism seek to explain it from a presumed logical-theoretical unity (like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jürgen Habermas) or through a sociological approach (like Alvin Gouldner, Russell Jacoby, Martin Jay and Michael Löwy) or as the result of a national intellectual tradition (George Lichteim, Andrew Arato and Paul Breines).
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However, Perry Anderson escapes the trap of wanting to attribute “a posteriori” (post hoc) unity to a movement which developed independently and without a pre-established plan.
His exhibition is structured as a piece in two movements. First, it seeks to determine the formal structures that allow Western Marxism to be defined as a common intellectual tradition, despite its internal divergences and oppositions. Once the structural coordinates are established, it then promotes a historical balance, comparing the premises and heritage of Western Marxism with previous generations.
2.
Before even attempting any proof of the veracity of a probable theoretical or formal unity which underlies Western Marxism, Perry Anderson is obliged to give the names of its components.
This anticipation (constructed so as not to compromise its subsequent effort to highlight structural constants) is based on the geographical criteria inscribed in the name itself (Western) to select the authors only among the Germans, the French and the Italians.
In fact, more than determining the places of training and political activity of these intellectuals, the main factor favored by Perry Anderson was the date of birth or anything that contributes to constituting a new “generation”. After all, your choice of components only becomes feasible if it is included in a series that sets out in a brief and stimulating way the evolution of historical materialism (since Marx and Engels) in the form of a succession of generations.
However, the shift produced by this new intellectual configuration (in his terms: the change of axis from economic and political analysis to philosophical and cultural criticism) cannot be explained by generational or geographical criteria.
Aware of the insufficiency of an interpretation based solely on the origin (whether socio-familial, chronological or territorial) of its members, Perry Anderson adds another consideration, which soon prevails over the others: the divorce of this generation from political practice.
This primacy, in addition to making his choice more credible, is justified not only by the eminently historical character of the explanation, but also because it results from a comparison, as a whole, of Western Marxism with the previous generation. Thus, the thesis according to which this lineage was defined by a break between theory and practice legitimizes Perry Anderson’s historical assessment.
However, whatever the premises and the veracity of this balance, the following objection arises: how can we group in the same bloc authors opposed to party life and struggle – like Max Horkheimer, Lucien Goldmann or Theodor Adorno – and important political leaders (active participants and even organizers of defeated revolutionary uprisings) like Lukács, Korsch and Gramsci?
3.
Perry Anderson is not ignoring this question. To answer this, he divides the members of Western Marxism into two groups. Made up of intellectuals trained politically or radicalized following the First World War and the insurrections that followed (1917-23), its members included Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci.
Grouping together those who came of age later and were politically formed by the advance of fascism and the Second World War, the other group would include Max Horkheimer, Galvano Della Volpe, Henri Lefebvre, Theodor Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lucien Goldmann, Louis Althusser and Lucio Colletti.
However, even if Perry Anderson does not lack awareness of historical vicissitudes, he draws little conclusion from the fact that “two great tragedies, fascism and Stalinism, in such different ways, struck the European labor movement in the interwar period”, forging a new model for the Marxist tradition.
The destruction of party organizations, the integration of the proletariat and Keynesian regulation led Marxists to favor the examination of the stabilizing factors of bourgeois society, seeking to understand the reasons for “institutionalized popular consent in relation to capital in the West”.
*Ricardo Mussé He is a professor in the Department of Sociology at USP. Author, among other books, of Trajectories of European Marxism (Unicamp Publisher). (https://amzn.to/40ZkKMz)
Reference
Perry Anderson. Considerations on Western Marxism. Translation: Fábio Fernandes. São Paulo, Boitempo, 2019, 214 pages. (https://amzn.to/48peDGL)
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