Читать книгу In the Tracks of Historical Materialism - Perry Anderson - Страница 8

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 dwindled away after the silencing of Gramsci; strategic discussion of the roads to a realizable socialism disappeared almost entirely. What increasingly took their place was a revival of philosophical discourse proper, itself centred on questions of method — that is, more epistemological than substantive in character. In this respect, Korsch’s work of 1923, Marxism and Philosophy, proved prophetic. Sartre, Adorno, Althusser, Marcuse, Della Volpe, Lukács, Bloch and Colletti all produced major syntheses essentially focused on problems of cognition, however dialectically reformulated, written in an idiom of forbidding technical difficulty. For their purposes, each had recourse to philosophical legacies anterior to Marx himself: Hegel, Spinoza, Kant, Kierkegaard, Schelling or others. At the same time, each school within Western Marxism developed in close contact, often quasi-symbiosis, with coeval intellectual systems of a non-Marxist character; borrowing concepts and themes from Weber in the case of Lukács, Croce in the case of Gramsci, Heidegger in the case of Sartre, Lacan in the case of Althusser, Hjelmslev in that of Della Volpe, and so on. The patterning of this series of lateral relationships to bourgeois culture, alien to the tradition of classical Marxism, was itself a function of the dislocation of the relationships that had once held between it and the practice of the workers’ movement. The lapse of these latter in turn inflected the whole Western Marxist tradition towards a subjacent pessimism, exhibited in the very innovations which it brought to the thematic range of historical materialism — whether in Sartre’s theory of the logic of scarcity, Marcuse’s vision of social one-dimensionality, Althusser’s insistence on the permanence of ideological illusion, Benjamin’s fear of the confiscation of the history of the past, or even Gramsci’s own bleak stoicism.

At the same time, within its newly constricted parameters, the brilliance and fertility of this tradition were by any standards remarkable. Not merely did Marxist philosophy achieve a general plateau of sophistication far beyond its median levels of the past; but the major exponents of Western Marxism also typically pioneered studies of cultural processes — in the higher ranges of the superstructures—as if in glittering compensation for their neglect of the structures and infrastructures of politics and economics. Above all, art and ideology were the privileged terrain of much of this tradition, sounded by thinker after thinker with an imagination and precision that historical materialism had never deployed here before. In the final days of Western Marxism, one can, indeed, speak of a veritable hypertrophy of the aesthetic — which came to be surcharged with all the values that were repressed or denied elsewhere in the atrophy of living socialist politics: utopian images of the future, ethical maxims for the present, were displaced and condensed into the vaulting meditations on art with which Lukács or Adorno or Sartre concluded much of their life’s work.

Still, whatever the outer limits of the tradition represented by theorists like these, in and through its very distance from immediate political practice it remained proof against any temptations to compromise with the established order. Western Marxism as a whole refused any reformist compact. The soil from which it arose was one in which mass Communist parties commanded the allegiance of the vanguard of the working class in the major countries of continental Europe — parties which by the late twenties were at once intransigent foes of capital, and Stalinized structures that permitted no serious discussion or dissent on major political issues, debarring in advance any revolutionary circuit between theory and practice. In these conditions, some of the major minds of Western Marxism — Lukács, Althusser, Della Volpe — chose to remain formal members of their respective parties, while developing as far as they could a discourse remote from official dogmas, in coded opposition to them. Others, like Sartre, attempted to theorize the practice of these parties from a position outside them. Others again, like Adorno in post-war Germany, abstained from any direct relationship to politics whatsoever. But none of these capitulated to the status quo, or ever embellished it, through the worst years of the Cold War.

This long and tantalizing tradition — so I argued — was finally becoming exhausted at the turn of the seventies. There were two reasons for that. The first was the reawakening of mass revolts within Western Europe — indeed right across the advanced capitalist world — where the great wave of student unrest in 1968 heralded the entry of massive contingents of the working class into a new political insurgency, of a kind not seen since the days of the Spartacists or the Turin councils. The May explosion in France was the most spectacular of these, followed by the tide of industrial militancy in Italy in 1969, the decisive miners’ strike in Britain which overthrew the Conservative government in 1974, and then, a few months later, the upheaval in Portugal, with its rapid radicalization towards a revolutionary situation of the most classic type. In none of these cases did the impetus for popular rebellion derive from the established parties of the Left, whether Social-Democratic or Communist. What they appeared to prefigure was the possibility of an end to the semi-secular divorce of socialist theory from mass working-class practice, which had left such a crippling mark on Western Marxism itself. At the same time, the protracted post-war boom came to an abrupt halt in 1974, for the first time in 25 years putting the basic socio-economic stability of advanced capitalism in question. Subjectively and objectively, then, conditions seemed to be clearing the way for another sort of Marxism to emerge.

My own conclusions as to its likely shape — conclusions that were also recommendations, lived in a spirit of reasoned optimism — were fourfold. Firstly, I reckoned that the surviving doyens of the Western Marxist tradition were unlikely to produce any further work of significant moment, while many of their immediate disciples were showing signs of veering towards what would be a disastrous fixation with China as an alternative model of post-revolutionary society to the USSR, and an exemplar for socialist explorations in the West. Secondly, I suggested that the reopening of a loop between Marxist theory and mass practice in the advanced countries could recreate some of the conditions that had once formed the classical canon of historical materialism in the generation of Lenin or Luxemburg. Any such reunification of theory and practice would have two consequences, I thought: it would inevitably shift the whole centre of gravity of Marxist culture towards the set of basic problems posed by the movement of the world economy, the structure of the capitalist state, the constellation of social classes, the meaning and function of the nation — all of which had been systematically neglected for many years. A turn to the concrete, a return to the preoccupations of the mature Marx or Lenin, seemed to impose itself. Such a change would necessarily revive that dimension which above all else had been missing from the Western Marxist tradition since the death of Gramsci — namely, strategic discussion of the ways in which a revolutionary movement could break past the barriers of the bourgeois-democratic state to a real socialist democracy beyond it. Once there was any renewal of strategic debate, I speculated, it was likely that the major oppositional tradition to Stalinism that had survived in direct, if radically marginalized, continuity from classical Marxism — that which descended from Trotsky — would tend to acquire a new relevance and vitality, freed from the conservatism in which its defence of a vanquished past had often tended to congeal it.

Thirdly, I predicted that any renascence of a more classical cast of Marxist culture would be virtually bound to involve the spread of the latter to the Anglo-American bastions of imperialism, which by and large had resisted historical materialism so successfully in the epoch of ‘Western’ Marxism itself. It was in the UK and USA, after all — the oldest and the most powerful of capitalist states, respectively — that the most testing problems for socialist theory had always been posed, and left perforce unanswered. The campus revolts of the late sixties, whatever their other limitations, appeared to hold the promise of a future socialist intelligentsia capable of surpassing in quantity and quality anything either society had known in the past. Fourthly, and finally, I argued that any further development of historical materialism would not only have to re-examine, tranquilly and firmly, the heritage of the classical thinkers, from Marx and Engels through to Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, seeking to identify, criticize and resolve their characteristic omissions or confusions. It would also have to come to terms with the fundamental gains made by Marxist historiography — above all in the Anglo-American area — since the Second World War, which had hitherto always lain outside the central perimeter of Marxist theory, dominated as it was by the discipline of philosophy. The confrontation and integration of the two would involve a reconsideration of the whole statute and significance of the past, in a system of thought geared overwhelmingly, at a day-to-day level, to the present or future; and it would leave neither history nor theory unchanged in the encounter between the two.⁹

Such were my conjectures at the time. How have they fared, against the actual course of events? Their most general surmise, it seems to me, has been confirmed — though, as we shall see, in a way that gives no cause for comfort or complacency. That is to say, the grand Western Marxist tradition — with its epistemological or aesthetic, sombre or esoteric tonalities — has effectively come to an end, and in its stead there has emerged, with remarkable celerity and confidence, another kind of Marxist culture, primarily oriented towards just those questions of an economic, social or political order that had been lacking from its predecessor. The productivity of this Marxism has been formidable, leaving little doubt that we have been witnessing a period of overall growth and emancipation. Within this broad perspective, however, history had — as usual — prepared some disconcerting surprises and ironies for the guesses hazarded at the time. Let us look at this in more detail.

The conviction that the Western Marxist tradition had essentially run its course was, as I have said, proved correct. This was not an especially difficult development to foresee. In part, the sheer biological toll of the generation of elders was bound to play its part. Between the watershed year of 1968 and the time of my essay, death caught up with Della Volpe, Adorno, Goldmann, Lukács and Horkheimer. By the end of the decade Bloch, Marcuse and Sartre had followed. But the process of exhaustion at work had other sources as well. The two youngest of the theorists I had discussed were Althusser and Colletti, both of whom were still in their prime in these years. Yet, much as anticipated, neither produced any work of substance thereafter, declining into repetition or denegation. By and large, a line could be drawn below the original Western Marxist experience by the middle of the seventies.

What succeeded it? A sudden zest, a new appetite, for the concrete. If we pass in review those key topics which had remained most ignored by the Western Marxist tradition, and on whose enumeration I had insisted in 1974, we can see that in the majority of cases they brought forth concentrated theoretical activity, often yielding notable syntheses, in the next years. The laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production as a whole — which, if we except Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, with its quasi-Keynesian framework, had been fallow ground for Marxist enquiry since Grossmann’s theorization on the eve of the Great Depression — were now explored by three decisive bodies of work: firstly, Ernest Mandel’s path-breaking Late Capitalism, followed by his studies on The Second Slump and Long Waves in the History of Capitalism; secondly, Harry Braverman’s great book on the transformation of the labour process in the twentieth century, Labor and Monopoly Capital; and thirdly, the French economist Michel Aglietta’s ambitious and original Theory of Capitalist Regulation.¹⁰ With works like these, Marxist discussion of contemporary capitalism has once again reached, and in some vital respects surpassed, the level of the classical epoch of Luxemburg and Hilferding. Concrete historical investigations have at the same time been accompanied by a renewal of intense conceptual and methodological debate, associated with the names of Morishima, Steedman, Roemer, Lippi, Krause and others.¹¹ As to the political domain, the specific structures of the modern capitalist state had been one of the great blind areas of Western Marxism, all too little concerned with the precise nature of the Western polities in which it subsisted. Today, this absence too has in considerable measure been made good, with a series of important and cumulative studies. These include, of course, the five books by Nicos Poulantzas, exploring the whole gamut of parliamentary, fascist and military types of capitalist state; the more empirically based work of Ralph Miliband in England; the debates of the Kapitallogik school in West Germany, and the contributions of Claus Offe; and the pivotal recent book by the Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn What does the Ruling Class do When it Rules?.¹² At the same time, the new types of social stratification in late capitalism have been the object of studies at once more rigorous and more imaginative than anything historical materialism, even in its classical epoch, had produced in the past: Erik Olin Wright’s work in the United States, that of the Italian Carchedi, and the investigations of Roger Establet and Christian Baudelot in France, have been outstanding in this regard.¹³ The nature and dynamics of the post-capitalist states in the East, long prohibited terrain for serene enquiry on much of the European Left, have received new and searching attention, above all in Rudolf Bahro’s extraordinary The Alternative in Eastern Europe, but also in more specialist and scholarly form in the studies of economists like Nuti and Brus.¹⁴ Nor has this expansion of Marxist theory in economics, politics and sociology been accompanied by any corresponding contraction in the fields of philosophy or culture—the peculiar vineyards of Western Marxism. On the contrary, these years have also seen the accumulating work of Raymond Williams in England, materialist cultural studies in their broadest sense, and of Fredric Jameson in the United States, in the more specifically literary domain; while in philosophy G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History—A Defence, bringing for the first time the procedural standards of analytic philosophy to bear on the basic concepts of historical materialism, is clearly the landmark of the decade.¹⁵

A staccato bibliography of this sort does not, of course, come near a comprehensive, let alone critical, inventory of the Marxist production of the past years. There are other works and names that could equally be mentioned; and those that have been are as much subject to their own limiting judgements as are any of their predecessors. However, even this rapid shorthand for a complex set of intellectual changes, which need much finer discrimination than there is time for here, indicates certain points. Although we can speak of a real topographical ‘break’ between Western Marxism and the emergent formation I have been outlining, in other respects there has perhaps been more continuity of connections than I allowed for, even if it has typically been a mediate one. Thus the influence of most of the older schools can be discerned in the background of many of the newcomers. The Althusserian current has probably persisted most strongly: of the names I mentioned earlier, Poulantzas, Therborn, Aglietta, Wright and Establet all owe different debts to it. The legacy of the Frankfurt School can be seen in Braverman’s work, through Baran, and Offe’s, through Habermas. The Lukácsian strain remains avowedly dominant in Jameson’s work. Carchedi’s reveals Della Volpean overtones. But at the same time, the very distribution of these authors hints at the more important fact that the geographical pattern of Marxist theory has been profoundly altered in the past decade. Today the predominant centres of intellectual production seem to lie in the English-speaking world, rather than in Germanic or Latin Europe as was the case in the inter-war and post-war periods respectively. That shift in locus represents an arresting historical change. Very much as I had felt might happen, the traditionally most backward zones of the capitalist world, in Marxist culture, have suddenly become in many ways the most advanced.

A more extended survey of authors and works would bring this home fully: the sheer density of ongoing economic, political, sociological and cultural research on the Marxist Left in Britain or North America, with its undergrowth of journals and discussions, eclipses any equivalent in the older lands of the Western Marxist tradition proper. But there is, of course, a further reason for the nascent Anglo-American hegemony in historical materialism today — one that has in its turn verified another of the predictions made in the mid-seventies. That is the rise of Marxist historiography to its long overdue salience within the landscape of socialist thought as a whole. In this area, the dominance of English-speaking practitioners had been evident ever since the fifties, and for many decades Marxism as an intellectual force, at least in England, had been virtually synonymous with the work of historians. Even the one outstanding thinker of an older generation and another formation, the economist Maurice Dobb, characteristically achieved his greatest influence with the essentially historical Studies in the Development of Capitalism (published in 1947), stretching from the late Middle Ages to the modern corporation, rather than with his prolific output on Marx’s political economy as such. It was Dobb’s younger colleagues, gathered in the seminal Communist Party Historians’ Group of the late forties and early fifties, however, who matured into the brilliant pleiad of scholars that transformed so many accepted interpretations of the English and European past in the following years: Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Edward Thompson, George Rudé, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan, Geoffrey de Ste-Croix and others. Most of these were publishing from the turn of the sixties onwards. But the consolidation of their collective work into a canon of commanding weight well beyond their own formal discipline, was really a development of the seventies. This was the decade which saw the publication of The Age of Capital by Hobsbawm, The World Turned Upside Down and Milton and English Revolution by Hill, Bond Men Made Free and The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages by Hilton, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution by Foster, Whigs and Hunters by Thompson, Lords of Humankind by Kiernan, now followed by Ste-Croix’s monumental Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World.¹⁶ Perhaps Raymond Williams’s most original and powerful book, The Country and the City, has its primary affiliation here, too. For someone of my generation, formed at a time when British culture seemed utterly barren of any indigenous Marxist impulse of moment, the laggard of Europe, which we constantly denounced as such, at risk of charges of ‘national nihilism’, this has been a truly astonishing metamorphosis. The traditional relationship between Britain and Continental Europe appears for the moment to have been effectively reversed — Marxist culture in the UK for the moment proving more productive and original than that of anv mainland state.

Meanwhile, a more restricted but not dissimilar change has occurred in North America. Here too, historiography has been the leading sector, with an extremely rich range of work — not confined to American history itself — from Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner, David Montgomery, Robert Brenner, David Abraham and many others.¹⁷ But around it a broader socialist culture has developed, not all of it Marxist, of striking variety and vitality, from the historical sociology of Immanuel Wallerstein and Theda Skocpol to the political economy of James O’Connor, the continuing work of Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, the cultural criticism of Christopher Lasch.¹⁸ The panorama in this respect is today radically distinct from anything even imaginable fifteen years ago. It is one in which Business Week can lament the widespread penetration of historical materialism into US campuses only four short years after Time was proclaiming that Marx was finally dead, and handbooks can be produced on the Left simply to guide the curious student through the thickets — now passably luxuriant — of ‘Marxism in the Academy’, to paraphrase a recent title.¹⁹

This historically centred Marxist culture that has emerged in the Anglophone world has, finally, not remained confined to its own provinces. The theoretical juncture between historiography and philosophy to which I looked forward in the mid-seventies did punctually occur, if with a violence that was far from my expectation of it. Edward Thompson’s prolonged and passionate polemic with Louis Althusser, The Poverty of Theory, turned an intellectual page — irreversibly. Whatever our view of the merits of the dispute, it is henceforward impossible for Marxists to proceed — as they did for many years, on either side — as if their history and their theory were two separate mental worlds, with little more than occasional tourism, mildly curious, between them. Theory now is history, with a seriousness and severity it never was in the past; as history is equally theory, in all its exigency, in a way that it typically evaded before. The assault by Thompson on Althusser also exemplified the breaking down of one further, crucial barrier: that which had always confined the major schools or debates within Western Marxism to national contexts, ensuring mutual ignorance or silence between them, to the detriment of any genuinely internationalist discourse. This twofold gain — the new exchanges between history and theory, and across national frontiers — has been among the most fruitful changes in the past decade. That they are not mere swallows without a summer can be seen from the kindred styles of debate over the work of Immanuel Wallerstein on the world capitalist system, probed in essentially theoretical terms by Robert Brenner among others, and over the work of Brenner on the transition to capitalism, in its turn — the focus of one of the widest professional controversies since the war, with international responses from historians in Germany and France, England and Poland.²⁰ Similarly, the discussion of value theory in Marxist economics no longer has national boundaries, even of a temporary sort: the circuits of argument switch freely from Japan to Belgium, Canada to Italy, Britain to Germany or the US, as recent symposia testify.²¹

So far, then, the hopes and hypotheses advanced in my Considerations on Western Marxism seem to have been largely realized. But any note of satisfaction, let alone self-satisfaction, would be out of place. For in one absolutely decisive respect the flow of theory in these years did not run in the direction I had envisaged. The reunification of Marxist theory and popular practice in a mass revolutionary movement signally failed to materialize. The intellectual consequence of this failure was, logically and fatally, the general dearth of real strategic thinking on the Left in the advanced countries — that is, any elaboration of a concrete or plausible perspective for a transition beyond capitalist democracy to a socialist democracy. Rather than a ‘poverty of theory’, what the Marxism that succeeded Western Marxism continues to share with its predecessor is a ‘poverty of strategy’. It is impossible to point out any single body of writing in these years which reveals, even faintly, the kind of conceptual attack, the combination of political resolution and theoretical imagination that marked the great interventions of Luxemburg or Lenin, Trotsky or Parvus, in the years before the First World War. The determinants of this central deficit, which precludes any triumphalist retrospect of the past decade, pose the question of the larger social conditions in which Marxism developed in these years. But before we look at this wider historical context, it is necessary to take stock of a phenomenon whose ultimate relation to the strategic void remains to be ascertained, but whose immediate reality seems in the most clamorous contradiction to any claim for a renaissance of historical materialism in the seventies. I refer, of course, to what came to be called — among those most affected by, or interested in, it — the ‘crisis of Marxism’. This process gave rise to the exultant covers of American and European mass media in 1977, of which Time magazine was only one. But although the scale and speed of the phenomenon were dramatic enough, the term itself was always a misleading one. What was really at issue was the crisis of a certain Marxism, geographically confined to Latin Europe — essentially France, Italy and Spain. Within this cultural and political area, there was indeed something approaching a collapse of the Marxist tradition by the late seventies, at the very moment when Marxism was conquering or consolidating new positions across a wide front outside it. It would be foolish to underestimate the gravity of this rout, not only for the countries concerned, but for the general credit of a rational socialist culture as a whole.

What were the characteristic syndromes of this crisis of Latin Marxism? Two major patterns can be distinguished. On the one hand, amidst a recrudescence of violent anti-communist fevers in the surrounding capitalist polity, in France and Italy especially, there was an abrupt and widespread renunciation of Marxism altogether, by thinkers of older and younger generations on the Left alike. The most spectacular reversal in this respect was perhaps that of Lucio Colletti, once the foremost Marxist philosopher in Italy, who in the space of three or four years became a shrill enemy of Marxism and staunch defender of a more or less conventional liberalism. His most recent book is not inappropriately entitled The Passing Away Of Ideology,²³ in unconscious reminiscence of a celebrated text in American sociology of some twenty years ago. In France, Sartre in his last years followed his own trajectory from denunciation of communism to formal renunciation of Marxism, in his case in the name of a radical neo-anarchism.²⁴ The mutation, or decline, of these eminences was no isolated affair, however. It corresponded to a much wider change of mood in literary and philosophical circles once associated with the Left. Emblematic in this regard were the writers and critics of the Tel Quel group, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva and others, who switched virtually overnight from strident asseverations of materialism and a cult of the social order in China, to revaluations of mysticism and exaltation of the social order in the United States.²⁵ André Glucksmann, barricade rebel and intellectual protege of Louis Althusser in the late sixties, became the leading publicist of the ‘New’ Philosophy — that is, a reiteration of the oldest themes in the ideological arsenal of the Cold War in the fifties, such as the equation of Marxism with totalitarianism, the identification of socialism with Stalinism.

Meanwhile, there was a second type of response to the change in political temperature in Latin Europe in the late seventies. This was not so much an outright repudiation or relinquishment of Marxism, as a dilution or diminution of it, pervaded by an increasing scepticism towards the very idea of a revolutionary rupture with capitalism. Symptomatic of this trend was Althusser’s growing distance from the political legacy of historical materialism as such, expressed in the denial that it had ever possessed any theory of State or politics, and betokening a radical loss of morale in one whose assertions of the scientific supremacy of Marxism had been more overweening and categorical than those of any other theorist of his time. Soon it was Althusser who was propagating the notion of ‘a general crisis of Marxism’ — a crisis he showed little haste to resolve.²⁶ Poulantzas, for his part, once a pillar of Leninist rectitude, now rediscovered the virtues of parliaments and the dangers of dual power: his final interviews before his death spoke, beyond even these, of a crisis of confidence in ‘politics’ as such.²⁷ The shadow of Michel Foucault, soon proclaiming the ‘end of politics’²⁸ as Bell or Colletti had done of ideology, no doubt lay heavily on these Parisian doubts. In Italy, the Communist Party itself was increasingly rife with similar currents. Its leading younger philosopher, Massimo Cacciari, told Italian workers from his chair in the Chamber of Deputies that Nietzsche had outdated Marx, the will to power proving more fundamental than the class struggle; while a sometimes sympathetic interest in the ideas of Friedman or Bentham could be found among many of his colleagues.

No intellectual change is ever universal. At least one exception, of signal honour, stands out against the general shift of positions in these years. The oldest living survivor of the Western Marxist tradition I discussed, Henri Lefebvre, neither bent nor turned in his eighth decade, continuing to produce imperturbable and original work on subjects typically ignored by much of the Left.²⁹ The price of such constancy, however, was relative isolation. Surveying the intellectual scene as a whole, we are left with an uncanny paradox. At the very time when Marxism as a critical theory has been in unprecedented ascent in the English-speaking world, it has undergone a precipitous descent in the Latin societies where it was most powerful and productive in the post-war period. In France and Italy above all, the two leading homelands of a living historical materialism in the fifties and sixties, for anyone like myself who learnt much of their Marxism from these cultures, the massacre of ancestors has been impressive. What is its meaning? The transverse movements of Marxist theory in the past decade remain to be explored. The problems they pose will be our topic tomorrow.

1. Max Horkheimer, ‘Traditionelle und kritische Theorie’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Vol. 2, 1937, p.274. He went on to note that such a theorist could ‘find himself in contradiction with views prevalent among the exploited’ — indeed, ‘without the possibility of that conflict there would be no need for the theory they require, since it would be immediately available’.

2. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, London 1973, p. 197.

3. Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Marx-Engels, Selected Works, Moscow 1951, p.228.

4. Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, London 1970, p. 51.

5. Considerations on Western Marxism, London 1976.

6. Georges Canguilhem, Etudes d’Histoire de Philosophie des Sciences, Paris 1970, p. 19.

7. Negative Dialectics, p. 198.

8. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, London 1963: compare pp. 73-74 with 139-141.

9. See Considerations on Western Marxism pp. 101-102; 95-101; 102-103; 109-112.

10. Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London 1975), The Second Slump (London 1978), Long Waves of Capitalist Development—The Marxist Interpretation, (Cambridge 1978); Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, New York 1975; Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: the US Experience, London 1979.

11. See Michio Morishima, Marx’s Economics, Cambridge 1973; Ian Steedman, Marx After Sraffa, London 1977; John Roemer, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class, Cambridge Mass., 1982; Marco Lippi, Value and Naturalism in Marx, London 1979; Ulrich Krause, Money and Abstract Labour, London 1982.

12. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, (London 1973), Fascism and Dictatorship (London 1974), Classes and Contemporary Capitalism (London 1975), The Crisis of the Dictatorships (London 1976), State, Power, Socialism (London 1978); Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London 1969), Marxism and Politics (Oxford 1977), Capitalist Democracy in Britain (Oxford 1982); John Holloway and Sol Picciotto, eds. State and Capital, London 1978; Claus Offe, Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates, Frankfurt 1975; Göran Therborn, What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules?—State Apparatuses and State Power under Feudalism, Capitalism and Socialism, London 1978: see also his important ensuing work, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, London 1980.

13. Erik Olin Wright, Class, Crisis and the State, (London 1978), and Class Structure and Income Determination, (New York 1979); Guglielmo Carchedi, On the Economic Identification of Social Classes, London 1977; Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, L’Ecole Capitaliste en France, Paris 1971; (with Jacques Malemort), La Petite Bourgeoisie en France, Paris 1974; (with Jacques Toisier), Qui Travaille pour Qui?, Paris 1979.

14. Rudolf Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe, London 1978; Domenico Mario Nuti, ‘The Contradictions of Socialist Economics’, The Socialist Register 1979; Wlodzimierz Brus, Socialist Ownership and Political Systems, London 1975.

15. See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London 1973), Marxism and Literature (Oxford 1977), Politics and Letters (London 1979), Problems in Materialism and Culture (London 1980), Culture (London 1981); Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, Ithaca 1981; G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History — A Defence, Oxford 1978.

16. Dates: The Age of Capital, London 1975; The World Turned Upside Down, London 1975; Milton and the English Revolution, London 1977; Bond Men Made Free, London 1973; The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages, Oxford 1975; Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, London 1974; Whigs and Hunters, London 1975; Lords of Humankind, London 1972; The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, London 1981.

17. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll — The World the Slaves Made, New York 1974, and From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World, New York 1979; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, New York 1970, and Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, New York 1976; David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, New York 1967, and Workers’ Control in America, New York 1979; Robert Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’, and ‘The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism’ Past and Present, No. 70, February 1976 and No. 97, November 1982; David Abraham, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis, Princeton 1981.

18. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, Vols. I and II, New York 1974 and 1980; Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, Cambridge 1979; James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State, New York 1973; Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, The Deepening Crisis of us Capitalism, New York 1981; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, New York 1978.

19. Bertell Oilman and Edward Vernhoff, eds. The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, New York 1982.

20. See Robert Brenner, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, No. 104, July-August 1977, and the symposium on Brenner’s work in Past and Present Nos. 78-80 and 85, February-August 1978 and November 1979, with contributions by Michael Postan and John Hatcher, Patricia Croot and David Parker, Heidi Wunder, Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie, Guy Bois, J. P. Cooper and Arnost Klima, now collected together with Brenner’s formidable response, in The Brenner Debate — Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge 1983 (forthcoming).

21. The Value Controversy, London 1981, with contributions from Ian Steedman, Paul Sweezy, Erik Olin Wright, Geoff Hodgson, Pradeep Bandyopadhyay, Makoto Itoh, Michel De Vroey, G.A. Cohen, Susan Himmelweit and Simon Mohun, and Anwar Shaikh.

23. Tramonto dell’ Ideologia, Rome 1980.

24. See the interviews given to Lotta Continua, 15 September 1977, and to Le Nouvel Observateur, 10-30 March 1980 (under the title ‘L’Espoir Maintenant’). The latter was published on the eve of his death, after the long loss of his physical powers so painfully recorded by Simone De Beauvoir, who views the text as a distorted mirror, the work of a manipulative interviewer, which she criticized to Sartre at the time. These circumstances qualify, but do not cancel, the changed direction of his final years. See Simone De Beauvoir, La Céremonie des Adieux, Paris 1981, pp. 149-152.

25. See, inter alia, Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet and Philippe Sollers, Pourquoi les Etats-Unis?, the special number of Tel Quel devoted to the United States, No. 71-73, Autumn 1977.

26. See ‘The Crisis of Marxism’, Marxism Today, July 1978.

27. See the interview ‘Le Risposte che è Difficile Trovare’, Rinascita, 12 October 1979.

28. See the interview, conducted by Bernard-Henri Lévy, with Foucault on the History of Sexuality, in Le Nouvel Observateur, No. 644, 12 March 1977.

29. Of especial interest are his works on urbanism: Le Droit à la Ville, Paris 1967, and La Production de l’Espace, Paris 1974.