Perry Anderson’s Weberian turn

Perry Anderson

In a massive (15,308 words) article that appears in the current New Left Review, Perry Anderson addresses “Two Revolutions”, namely the Russian and the Chinese. My expectations were that Anderson would be interesting as well as wrong. He did not disappoint.

Mostly the article can be reduced to a kind of laboratory experiment where one rat is compared to another. The rat that has been fed a constant diet of Big Macs will look sickly while the one that eats wheat germ and yogurt will look great. That, in a nutshell, is how Anderson approaches Russia and China. China’s success story, we are told, has a lot to do with “communism”, a term that Anderson deploys much more in the terms of bourgeois social science than Marxism. This is to be expected from somebody who announced to the world in 2000 in a NLR article titled “Renewals” that:

By contrast, commanding the field of direct political constructions of the time, the Right has provided one fluent vision of where the world is going, or has stopped, after another—Fukuyama, Brzezinski, Huntington, Yergin, Luttwak, Friedman. These are writers that unite a single powerful thesis with a fluent popular style, designed not for an academic readership but a broad international public. This confident genre, of which America has so far a virtual monopoly, finds no equivalent on the Left.

Little did Anderson suspect that only a few years later Fukuyama would do a 180 degrees turn and disavow his “end of history” thesis under the impact of an imploding financial system. That being said, he still seems smitten by the prospects of being “fluent” and “powerful”. I for one place much more importance on being truthful and revolutionary.

Setting the tone for the rest of the article, Anderson invokes the authority of Max Weber in distinguishing between the healthy and the sick lab rats.

More than just the wholly different temporality of this experience separated it from the overturn in Russia. The way in which power was won was altogether distinct. If the state is defined, in Weber’s famous formula, by the exercise of a monopoly of legitimate violence over a given territory, a revolution always involves a breaking of that monopoly, and the emergence of what Lenin and Trotsky called a dual power. Logically, there are three ways in which this can arise, corresponding to the three terms of Weber’s formula. A revolution can break the monopoly of the state’s power by destroying the legitimacy of its rule, so that coercion cannot be exercised to repress the movement against it. The Iranian Revolution, in which there was no fighting, the royal army remaining paralysed as the monarchy fell, would be an example. Alternatively, a revolution can pit an insurgent violence against the coercive apparatus of the state, overwhelming it in a quick knock-out blow, without having secured any general legitimacy. This was the Russian pattern, possible only against a weak opponent.

I don’t quite know what to make of all this except to say that I find Karl Marx’s definition of the state much more useful since it is put forward in class terms. In the formula above, that criterion is entirely missing.

Using the Weberian yardstick, Anderson finds the essential difference between Russia and China to revolve around the ability of the state to mobilize the power of the masses in achieving its goals in the fashion of a quarterback relying on his linemen. We are led to understand that the Chinese had a much better team, something that was afforded to a large part by particular historical circumstances as Anderson explains:

The victory of the PLA, far from leaving economy and society ravaged, delivered recovery and stability. Inflation was mastered; corruption banished; supplies resumed. In the countryside, landlordism was abolished. In the cities, no sweeping expropriation was needed, since over two-thirds of industry was already state-owned under the GMD [Nationalists], and comprador capital had fled to Hong Kong or Taiwan. The middle class was so alienated by the last years of Nationalist rule that much of it greeted the arrival of Communism with relief rather than resistance; as production revived, workers returned to normal employment and received wages again. The People’s Republic, embodying patriotic ideals and social discipline, entered life enjoying a degree of popular assent that the Soviet Union never knew.

After a while it becomes clear that Anderson’s main interest is in establishing how successful Russia and China were in accomplishing a set of goals usually associated with development economics and modernization, the very stuff of graduate school seminars using the texts of Max Weber, Walt Rostow and Theda Skocpol for reading assignments. By this criterion, progress is measured less in terms of social equality than it is in GDP. Anderson writes that Russia had a more auspicious beginning:

Of the two states as they crossed the threshold of reform, the USSR enjoyed to all appearances much the better conditions, material and cultural, for success. Its GDP was four to five times higher than that of China. Its industrial base was far larger, employing over twice the relative labour force. It was richer in nearly every natural resource—fossil fuels, valuable minerals, abundant land. It was much more urbanized. Its population was better fed, with an average intake of calories half as much again as in China.

But China would eventually leapfrog Russia largely because it could rely on much better “grunts”, the sort of social muscle that could put the football over the goal-line:

Socially, too, China had one huge, critical advantage over the USSR. The peasantry was not a listless, sullen rump of the class it had once been, as in Russia. It was neither tired nor disaffected, but full of potential energy, waiting to be released, as events would show. Historically, it had never possessed collective institutions comparable to the MIR. Rural society, long atomized in the North and shaken loose by the Taiping upheaval in the South, could recover after the Great Leap Forward with centuries of market impulses behind it. The absence of deep agrarian alienation was not, moreover, simply a difference between the two countrysides. Making up the overwhelming majority of the population, the Chinese peasantry was the central pediment of the nation. Its nearest equivalent in the USSR, even if not so proportionately large a part of society, would have been the industrial working class. But it too, though not so demoralized as the kolkhozniki, was by the 80s thoroughly disabused as a social force, deeply cynical about the regime, inured to make-work and low productivity, in compensation for the vast gap between its nominal role as the leading class in the state and its actual position in the hierarchy of privilege.

But most of all, China could rely on its superior leadership, who by comparison to the Soviet leaders were virtual Bart Starrs:

Yet, at the gateway to their reforms, perhaps the most decisive of all the differences between Russia and China lay in the character of their political leadership. In command of the PRC was not an isolated, inexperienced functionary, surrounded by aides and publicists infused with a naive Schwärmerei for all that was Western, but battle-hardened veterans of the original Revolution, leaders who had been Mao’s colleagues, and had suffered under him, but had lost none of their strategic skills or self-confidence.

Well, it is always good to have strategic skill and self-confidence especially when it comes to selling real estate or corporate bonds but I wonder how much this has to do with “communism”. Once again, Anderson is demonstrating a keen interest in everything about Russia and China except what once distinguished him as a Marxist a lifetime ago: the interests of the working class. For Anderson, the term “Leninist” does not mean what it once did. It is not what made Fidel Castro an exceptional politician but the kind of gift that will  help you climb the corporate ladder at a place like Microsoft:

In confronting the situation of the country as Mao had left it, this leadership, with Deng at its head, remained the revolutionaries they had always been. Their temper was Leninist: radical, disciplined, imaginative—capable at once of tactical patience and prudent experimentation, and of the boldest initiatives and most dramatic switches of direction.

Much of the rest of the article is devoted to breathless invocations to the special gifts of the Chinese rulers that can be found in Andre Gunder Frank’s “Reorient”, Martin Jacques’s latest book or in any of a dozen book-of-the-month club selections hailing the “Chinese century”:

The task of making good the lag between communism in China and capitalism in East Asia was a formidable agenda for any programme of reforms. But the Immortals were not daunted. They tackled it with a vigour born not just from the momentum, still active, of the Revolution they had made, but from a millennial self-confidence, battered for a century, but ultimately unbroken, of the oldest continuous civilization in the world. Mao’s dynamism, for better or worse, had been one expression of the recovery of that confidence. The Reform Era propelled by Deng would be another. In this historical self-assurance lay a fundamental difference between Russia and China.

Anderson seems to be as mesmerized by China as the editors of Monthly Review are by Iran. In neither country are workers permitted to challenge the bosses who invoke socialism or Islam in laying down the law. It is a sign of the times that these two august publications have succumbed to the siren call of the powerful state rather than the possibility of socialist transformation.

In Anderson’s 2000 article, he virtually washed his hands of the socialist project:

Ideologically, the novelty of the present situation stands out in historical view. It can be put like this. For the first time since the Reformation, there are no longer any significant oppositions—that is, systematic rival outlooks—within the thought-world of the West; and scarcely any on a world scale either, if we discount religious doctrines as largely inoperative archaisms, as the experiences of Poland or Iran indicate we may. Whatever limitations persist to its practice, neo-liberalism as a set of principles rules undivided across the globe: the most successful ideology in world history. What this means for a journal like NLR is a radical discontinuity in the culture of the Left, as it—or if it—renews itself generationally. Nowhere is the contrast with the originating context of the review sharper than in this respect. Virtually the entire horizon of reference in which the generation of the sixties grew up has been wiped away—the landmarks of reformist and revolutionary socialism in equal measure. For most students, the roster of Bebel, Bernstein, Luxemburg, Kautsky, Jaurès, Lukács, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci have become names as remote as a list of Arian bishops. How to reweave threads of significance between the last century and this would be one of the most delicate and difficult tasks before any journal that took the term ‘left’ seriously. There seem to be few guide-posts for it.

When Perry Anderson was in his twenties, he wrote two books that challenged exactly such moods that had turned an earlier generation of Marxists into pessimists. “Considerations on Western Marxism” and “In the Tracks of Historical Materialism” rebuked those who retreated into the academy and turned Marxism into the stuff of graduate seminars rather than the barricades.

The combined impact of a general retreat of the mass movement and his own donnish pursuits have led Perry Anderson into exactly what disgusted him as a young man. Some of us remain unrepentant Marxists while others find ways to become penitents. Of course, it would be a lot better if they simply dropped the pretensions to Marxism for the sake of clarity.

Back in March of 1999 Edward Sidelsky wrote a rather devastating profile of Perry Anderson in the New Statesman that is worth reproducing in its entirety. I will conclude on this sad note:

The New Statesman Profile – Perry Anderson; He is one of Britain’s great Marxist intellectuals, yet now he seems a strangely conservative figure.

By Edward Skidelsky

Perry Anderson exemplifies a type that has almost vanished: the unaffiliated intellectual. The leading British Trotskyite, he has never belonged to a political party. An eminent historian, he has never held a full-time post at a British university. His writing belongs to none of the various categories of academic literature; it attempts, at its most ambitious, to comprehend them all in a total synthesis. His thought owes allegiance to no national tradition; it belongs to the floating corpus of western Marxism. It is fitting, if ironic, that this revolutionary free-booter should finally settle at the University of California at Los Angeles. Repressive tolerance has triumphed over one of its fiercest adversaries. Anderson is notoriously elusive. No interviews, no broadcasts – and even the London School of Economics, where he is a visiting lecturer, did not have a photograph to contribute to the illustration of this profile. Yet for all his elusiveness, his influence on British intellectual life has been enormous. The conduit of this influence was the New Left Review, the socialist bi-monthly which he edited from 1962 to 1982. Anderson’s goal was the introduction into Britain of a new kind of socialist culture, alternative to both the official Marxism of the Communist Party and the stolid reformism of the Labour Party. His followers saw themselves as a revolutionary vanguard. Inspired by Gramsci, they aimed to establish a socialist hegemony in the realm of ideas from which, they hoped, a revolutionary movement would follow. The leading lights of Continental Marxism – Lucacs, Gramsci, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse and Althusser – were published and discussed, often for the first time in Britain. Non-Marxist structuralists such as Lacan and Levi-Strauss were also introduced. High theory was interspersed with the other amour of the era: Latin American terrorism.

Anderson’s cosmopolitanism is partly a product of biography. He was born in 1940 into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family; his father was an official in the Chinese Maritime Customs. Eton and the stuffy Oxford of the 1950s no doubt exacerbated Anderson’s distaste for ‘spiritual patriotism’. Marxism offered the alternative of a truly international ideology, and Trotskyism, with its tradition of ‘revolution in more than one country’, was the most internationalist variant of Marxism. Anderson cites, as precedent for his own attitude, ‘the scorn of Marx and Engels for German provinciality and philistinism, of Lenin and Trotsky for Russian religiosity and Oblomovism, of Gramsci for Italian operatics and sentimentalism’. The cosmopolitanism of Marxist theory was, one suspects, a stronger source of appeal for Anderson than its promise of social justice. His is a socialism of the head, not the heart.

The agenda of the New Left Review was set out by Anderson in a couple of fierce polemics: ‘Components of the National Culture’ (1968) and ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’ (1964). They are the most scintillating essays he has written. The mediocrity of postwar intellectual life in Britain is the subject of the former. Written with a young man’s scorn, the essay surveys and dismisses British contributions to history, philosophy, political theory, psychology and aesthetics. These local failings are the consequence of a more fundamental vacuum: the absence, at the centre of British intellectual life, of any general theory of society that might unify the disparate branches of inquiry. Sociology, in Anderson’s view, is the queen of the sciences. In its absence, intellectual life fragments; a process dignified by the English totems of ‘empiricism’ and ‘piecemeal research’. This failure is not innocent; nothing is innocent for a Marxist. The absence of social theory serves to perpetuate the bourgeois social order; that which cannot be conceived cannot, a fortiori, be attacked.

‘Origins of the Present Crisis’ was one of a series of articles by Anderson and Tom Nairn offering a historical explanation for the predicament analysed in ‘Components of the National Culture’. The failure of the English bourgeoisie to develop a coherent world-view was, they argued, a consequence of its failure to draw a clear line of opposition between itself and the aristocracy. The revolution of 1640 was aborted: the reform of 1832 half-hearted. A corrupt bargain was struck between nobility and capital, in which the former lent dignity to the latter in return for the preservation of its constitutional privileges. The timidity of the bourgeoisie in the face of the aristocracy was later paralleled by the timidity of the proletariat in face of the bourgeoisie. ‘A supine bourgeoisie produced a subordinate proletariat.’ The proletariat accepted from the bourgeoisie the ‘timid and dreary’ philosophy of Fabian gradualism. The result was ‘Labourism, most stolid and mundane of political movements’. This denigration of British history provoked a passionate reply from E P Thompson, a Marxist of very different lineage. Anderson responded, and their exchange is as interesting and as revealing as the better-remembered ‘Two Cultures’ debate between F R Leavis and C P Snow.

Anderson’s argument was put forward as an explanation not only of Britain’s cultural conservatism, but also of her relative economic decline. It addressed a widespread mood of the 1960s, in which anti-establishment attitudes were mingled with anxiety about falling growth. The image of the ‘clean break’ seemed to answer both problems at once. It quickly became part of the lexicon of Wilsonism; its echoes are still audible today in Blair’s rhetoric of ‘modernisation’.

The influence of the New Left Review increased steadily under Anderson’s editorship, its circulation rising from 2,000 to 8,000. Its impact was particularly strong in the new universities and polytechnics, where it contributed to the formation of that leviathan called critical theory. But as the New Left Review entered the 1980s, it became increasingly clear that the revolution it had initiated would not spread beyond the academy. And even there, its influence was confined to certain sub-disciplines in the humanities. All it had achieved, in fact, was the replacement of one kind of intellectual provincialism with another. It could hardly have been otherwise, given the collapse of socialist politics in this period.

The movement away from practical politics towards questions of culture and ideology is characteristic of western Marxism as a whole. The failure of Marx’s political and economic predictions left his disciples with only one remaining role – that of Kulturkritiker. As Anderson himself points out, ‘the hidden hallmark of western Marxism . . . is that it is the product of defeat’. His attitude towards it is ambivalent. Admiring its sophistication, he reproaches it with ‘culturalism’ and contrasts it unfavourably with the classical tradition of Trotsky. Even Gramsci, the most politically minded of the great western Marxists, is accused of shifting the burden of revolutionary struggle on to the cultural sphere and neglecting the mechanics of state power.

Anderson is too intelligent and honest to deny the intellectual and political triumph of the right in the past decade, and yet he has never formally renounced his revolutionary convictions. They have just sunk quietly into the background, becoming a kind of coda to what is now his main occupation – the exposition of other people’s ideas. In this he is masterly. Yet intellect and political loyalties still occasionally conflict, producing confusion. A good example of this is his essay on Francis Fukayama’s The End of History. Fukayama’s grand narrative of historical progress – even though it culminates in the triumph of bourgeois liberal democracy – is of precisely the kind to win Anderson’s admiration. Anderson defends it against its detractors, claiming, on impeccably Marxist grounds, that their various refutations of Fukayama’s hypothesis amount to nothing more than local difficulties, and do not constitute a genuine contradiction. But then – as if suddenly realising what he has admitted – he amasses a whole set of difficulties of his own, ranging from environmental problems to feminism. But these are no more a fundamental contradiction than the difficulties he has previously dismissed. All are manageable within the confines of the present world-system. Fukayama has beaten Anderson at his own game.

Defeated on the political plane, Anderson has at last succumbed to the ‘siren voices of idealism’. His latest essay, The Origins of Postmodernity, is a work of cultural criticism in the classic tradition of Benjamin and Adorno. It is essentially a defence and an elaboration of Frederic Jameson’s thesis that postmodernism constitutes ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’.

Postmodernism is a natural target of attack for a Marxist. What it signifies is the final disappearance of any critical perspective on the capitalist order. The Soviet Union, for all its imperfections, provided such a perspective, and its existence sustained the avant-garde throughout Europe and America. Now there is nothing but capitalism. Any revolt is immediately assimilated and commodified. Art, realising this, has abandoned its haughty intransigence and entered into alliance with the market. The tone of the essay is one of sorrowful resignation. Anderson can diagnose the malady, but he has no cure.

There is something strangely conservative about Anderson’s denunciation of a world in which, to quote Jameson, ‘we are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience’. All that remains of Marxism, now that the political illusions have been shattered, is nostalgia for a lost seriousness. It can hardly be a coincidence that the fiercest critics of postmodernism, the most intransigent defenders of the eternal verities, have all been Marxists: Alex Callinicos, David Harvey and Terry Eagleton. At first glance this appears an ironic reversal, but on reflection it could hardly have been otherwise. Marxism cannot be other than conservative, because the one truly revolutionary ideology of the modern world – under whose sign ‘everything solid melts into air’ – is capitalism.