Is Anarchism, not Marxism, the more relevant left tradition?

Mark Mazower

Considering the crisis of print media, the fact that I shelled out $18 for a year’s subscription to Bookforum is a recommendation that speaks for itself. Like Harper’s, the only other print publication that I subscribe to (going on for 30 years now), Bookforum is fairly restrictive in what it makes available online.

I discovered Bookforum after it absorbed Alfredo Lopez’s Political Theory Daily Review, an aggregation of links to scholarly and popular articles that was head and shoulders over the late Denis Dutton’s irritating Arts and Letters Daily. Lopez’s links became as much a part of my daily diet as a cup of coffee in the morning.

With the same general left-of-center orientation as Harpers, Bookforum is co-edited by Chris Lehmann, Michael Miller, and Albert Mobilio. I don’t know anything about the latter two, but Lehmann is one of my faves. Back in April 2009, he wrote an article titled “Rich People Things” for Awl that described his experience working at New York Magazine, an utterly brainless magazine distinguished by its articles on people like Donald Trump and its recommendations on where to buy chocolate in New York, etc. I could be wrong, but I think well over half the doctor and dentist’s waiting rooms have back issues of New York Magazine to keep patients mollified.

Lehmann’s article begins:

My ill-starred tenure at New York magazine was, among other things, a crash course in the staggering unselfawareness of Manhattan class privilege. Sure, there was the magazine’s adoring, casual fascination with the “money culture”-a term deployed in editorial meetings without the faintest whiff of disapproval or critical distance. But more than that, there was the sashaying mood of preppy smugness that permeated nearly every interaction among the magazine’s editorial directorate-as when one majordomo tried to make awkward small talk with me by asking what it was like attending an urban public high school, or when another scion of the power elite would blithely take the credit for other people’s work and comically strategize to be seated prominently at the National Magazine Awards luncheon.

How could you not subscribe to a magazine that has someone like this as an editor?

I finally decided to subscribe to Bookforum after seeing that an article titled “Leon Trotsky and the Arab Spring” that was included in the summer 2011 issue was available only to subscribers. No matter how hard I tried to find a copy online, it was no dice.

That wasn’t the only meaty piece of prose in the issue. It also had Roger D. Hodge’s review of Ross Perlin’s new Verso book “Intern Nation”. Hodge was the editor of Harpers until he ran afoul of John McArthur, its deep-pocketed but capricious publisher. Hodge wrote a brilliant take-down of Barack Obama that I reviewed fairly recently at Swans.

Hodge’s article is one of the few that is online and this should give you an idea of his take on life under Late Capitalism, in sync obviously with the magazine’s editors:

Although it is billed as an educational and career opportunity, the Disney internship offers little more than a menial service job. Most Disney “interns” spend their days as “cast members” performing wonderful tasks like flipping burgers, cleaning toilets and hotel rooms, parking cars, and stocking gift shops. In essence, the program provides a hugely profitable corporation with a transitional population of fresh-faced temps, thus enabling Disney World, America’s largest single-site employer, to keep labor costs as low as possible.

Working my way through the summer issue of Bookforum, that began to remind me more and more of the New York Review of Books in the 1960s when it had some kind of edge (one NY Review had a do-it-yourself diagram of a Molotov cocktail on its cover), I was delighted to see an article by Columbia professor Mark Mazower. Mazower is the author of “Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950″, a book that I have read and strongly recommend. He is also the author of the highly regarded “Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe” and “No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations”. Since all of these books were written after 2003, we are clearly dealing with a powerful and productive scholar who also aims for a broader readership. The only other intellectual I can think of who has such breadth and depth is Arno Mayer, the Princeton professor emeritus who has begun contributing to Counterpunch.

Despite my deepest respect for Professor Mazower’s scholarly works, I must take exception to his article titled “Propaganda of the Deed: Is Anarchism, not Marxism, the more relevant left tradition?” that appears in the summer Bookforum (unfortunately, only available to subscribers.)

Mazower’s article is based partly on a review of Alex Butterworth’s “The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents”, a book that I have no plans to read. After reading a few hundred pages of Bakunin back in 2002 when anarchism, Hacky Sack and breaking Starbucks windows were all the rage, I could understand why Marx got so riled up dealing with the extravagant Russian who while not lacking in personal courage was certainly a bit intellectually deficient. Of course, not too many thinkers can compete with Karl Marx even if Butterworth feels compelled to describe him as presiding over a “bullying and overbearing branch of Teutonic socialism.”

While it is not exactly clear whether Mazower is channeling Butterworth or speaking for himself, I had to rub my eyes in disbelief after reading: “…the memory of the Commune gave anarchists a cause to rally around and a model of future action that was local and bottom-up, not dependent on the capture of state institutions, as Marx’s more evolutionary approach seemed to mandate.”

Where in the world does this notion come from about “the capture of state institutions” through an “evolutionary approach”? Now I understand that Eduard Bernstein developed a “revisionist” socialism that rested on a willful misinterpretation of Marx’s writings and that corresponded to this erroneous summary of his views, but this is simply not how Marx saw things. When Marx stated in “The Civil War in France”, his study of the Paris Commune, that “…the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes“, how much clearer could it be that he did not favor “the capture of state institutions”? It is irresponsible to convey this impression to Bookforum’s readers, many of whom have never read Karl Marx except when forced to in an undergraduate course.

In contrast to the bullying and overbearing Karl Marx with his evolutionary approach, there are people like Bakunin, who according to Butterworth (and Mazower we must once again assume) “resisted any engagement with the state on principle”. But how does this square with Bakunin’s  1862 “The People’s Cause: Romanov, Pugachev, or Pestel”? The three figures respectively stood for various social layers: Romanov the aristocracy, Pugachev the peasant firebrand and Pestel the privileged intelligentsia. Guess what? Romanov was best qualified to lead the revolution:

We should most gladly of all follow Romanov, if Romanov could and would transform himself from a Petersburg Emperor into a National Tsar. We should gladly enroll under his standard because the Russian people still recognizes him and because his strength is concentrated, ready to act, and might become an irresistible strength if only he would give it a popular baptism. We would follow him because he alone could carry out and complete a great, peaceful revolution without shedding one drop of Russian or Slav blood.

I know that Karl Marx was a perfectly beastly figure but I doubt you would find such idiocy in any of his writings.

After giving Butterworth much more credit than I am afraid he deserves, Mazower turns his attention to Eric Hobsbawm’s “How to Change the World: tales of Marx and Marxism”. Despite my preference, heavily qualified, for Hobsbawm over Butterworth, I doubt that I will read this book either.

We learn from the review that, according to Hobsbawm, Marxism took a nose dive starting in the early 1980s that it never really recovered from.

We are also told that a shrinking working class is robbing Marxism of its principal claim, namely that the capitalist system provides its own gravediggers. All I can say is that this exactly what I heard from another Columbia professor back in 1968 or so, a guy by the name of Herbert Marcuse. This business about the disappearance or shrinking of the working class has been around for a half-century at least. Maybe it is time to give it a break, especially since vast portions of the planet have been proletarianized during this period on a level that would have made the Karl Marx of the Communist Manifesto look like one of history’s greatest prophets.

In conclusion, Mazower finds Marxism altogether unfashionable even if undeservedly so:

The most commonly encountered critiques of mainstream economics—at least in the United States and Western Europe—are not Marxist but Keynesian. The very fine Marxists commentators who do write in Latin America or southern Europe—for instance, on the current sovereign-debt crisis in Europe—are hardly noticed here.

Well, I have no doubt that Keynesians get more notice in the USA than Marxists but one cannot be sure what point is being made. Marxists have gotten used to being voices in the wilderness ever since Karl Marx was burning the midnight oil in the London library. That’s what happens when you want to destroy the existing system. You’ll never get a proper NY Times op-ed column or a Nobel Prize in economics acting up that way.

In the final paragraph, Mazower gets wild and crazy. I hope that the Starbucks on 114^th and Broadway keeps a watchful eye after reading this:

One must wonder if whether it is in fact anarchism and not Marxism that speaks most clearly to our current condition. It is not just that Marx’s actual explanation for the causes of capitalist crisis was always undertheorized and in any case referred to an older kind of economy that lacked the complex and panic-inducing financial mechanisms that are commonplace now. Above all, the attractiveness of Marx’s thought as a model is fatally compromised in the eyes of many natural critics of capitalism today by his commitment to organization and to rigid party discipline. Anarchism’s combination of individual commitment, ethical universalism, and deep suspicion of the state as a political actor mark it out as the ideology for our times. We are all anarchists now.

Well, there’s a lot to chew over here but I will be brief.

On the question of complex financial mechanisms, I can only say that Socialist Register has been examining such questions for decades now, especially in the articles of Leo Panitch and the late Peter Gowan. Their archives are online and I particularly recommend the 2011 edition titled “The Fire this Time” that includes an article by the New School’s Anwar Shaikh titled “The First Great Depression of the 21st Century“. Shaikh, who is not above integrating Keynesian insights when useful, can be accused of many things (well, maybe not that many) but least among them is that he gives complex financial mechanisms short shrift.

On Marx and rigid party discipline. I am afraid that Professor Mazower has him confused with Lenin. That being said, Lenin only expelled one member of the Bolshevik Party in its entire history: Bogdanov.

In any case, Lenin’s party did manage to topple the capitalist system in the USSR even if the end result was a despotic system that made a mockery of the word socialism. While I would not question an anarchist’s “individual commitment” or “ethical universalism”, qualities that I am sure they possess in abundance, we are facing a serious and widespread problem of the inability of an amorphous and leaderless mass movement to deliver a death blow to Greek, Egyptian or any other decaying capitalist system. Under such desperate conditions, there will be a need for a highly disciplined and organized revolutionary movement to challenge the power of the rich. The one thing we have learned from history is that failed revolutions pay a heavy penalty for a failure to go all the way. Whatever problems Marxism has as a movement, it at least provides its adherents with a methodology to analyze the relationship of class forces in a given society so as to help develop an intelligent strategy and tactics. As the crisis of world capitalism deepens, young people—working class or non-working class—will be looking for a sharp sword to use against the enemy class. I am reasonably sure that Karl Marx’s writings will remain relevant for them.

Ironically, the viability of Marxism receives support in the article that immediately follows Mazower’s, the very article that persuaded me to plunk down $18 for a subscription. Written by Graeme Wood, a contributor to the centrist Atlantic Monthly of all places, “Reading Trotsky in Tahir: what the Russian revolutionary can teach us about the Arab Spring” cares little about whether Marxists are “in” or not but instead reminds us of why someone like Trotsky is essential reading for Arab revolutionaries:

The czar and his state, like Mubarak and his, fail utterly to grasp the extent of its rot. In Russia, the mismanagement was most acutely foreign: The Russian military had led bloody misadventures in the Great War and the Russo-Japanese War. “The one thing the Russian generals did with a flourish was drag human meat out of the country,” writes Trotsky. “Beef and pork are handled with infinitely more economy.” In Egypt, the mismanagement had the same demoralizing effect—but turned inward, with a secret-police force that consisted of one in forty adults—and, similarly, brought only misery to the country’s people. Trotsky writes that the czar’s state could have tried to reform, but “on the contrary, withdrew into itself. It spirit of medievalism thickened under the pressure of hostility and fear, until it acquired the character of a disgusting nightmare overhanging the country.”

Mark Mazower says that “we are all anarchists now”. Well, when they start writing like Trotsky, maybe I’ll join up. But not until then.