History

Created 6/11/1997
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Interesting Passages from Perry Anderson

From Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1976):

"... the catastrophic perspectives... adopted [by 1928] at the Sixth Comintern Congress--the notorious 'Third Period' line with its violent attacks on reformist workers' organizations as 'social-fascist', and its nihilist denial of any distinction between bourgeois-democratic regimes and military-police dictatorships as instruments of capitalist rule." (p. 30)

"The tradition of Marxist economics which found its terminus in Sweezy's Theory of Capitalist Development in 1942 had been effectively consigned to the past at the end of that work, because of the visible success of the Keynesian renovation of the U.S. economy. When Sweezy and Baran returned to the subject with a full-scale work twenty years later, Monopoly Capital, the orthodox framework of Marxist economic categories had been largely renounced by them." (p. 46)

"Western Marxism as a whole thus paradoxically inverted the trajectory of Marx's own development itself. Where the founder of historical materialism had moved progressively from philosophy to politics and then economics... the successors... after 1920 increasingly turned back from economics and politics to philosophy--abandoning direct engagement with what had been the great concerns of the mature Marx.." (p. 52)

"The confidence and optimism of the founders of historical materialism... progressively disappeared. Virtually every one of the significant new themes in the intellectual muster of this epoch reveals the same diminution of hope and loss of certainty. Gramsci's theoretical legacy was the prospect of a long war of attrition against an immensely stronger structure of capitalist power, more proof against economic collapse than had been envisioned by his predecessors-- struggle with no final clarity of outcome visible.... Gramsci's revolutionary temper was tersely expressed in the maxim 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'..." (p. 89)

"Gramsci meanwhile, in prison and defeat, summed up the vocation of a revolutionary socialist in the epoch with a desolate stoicism: 'Something has changed, fundamentally. This is evident. What is it? Before, they all wanted to be the ploughmen of history, to play the active parts, each one of them to play an active part. Nobody wished to be the "manure" of history. But is it possible to plough without first manuring the land? So ploughman and manure are both necessary. In the abstract, they all admitted it. But in practice? Manure for manure, as well draw back, return to the shadows, into obscurity. Now something has changed, since there are those who adapt themselves "philosophically" to being "manure", who know that is what they must be.... There is not even the choice between living for a day like a lion, or a hundred years as a sheep. You don't live as a lion, even for a minute, far from it: you live like something far lower than a sheep for years and years and know that you have to live like that."' (p. 90)

History

Created 6/11/1997
Go to Brad DeLong's Home Page