78 | Perry Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism
Added 2023-12-05 11:00:06 +0000 UTCIn this episode we get the Perry Anderson treatment and ask if we philosophers are the problem with how Western Marxism has evolved over time. We discuss what Anderson calls the formal and thematic shifts that happened within this theoretical tradition once the philosophers got in the driver’s seat. Partly ethnographic, partly analytical, and a little more meta-philosophical than usual. We hope you’ll indulge us this once as we ask ourselves what the hell we’re doing.
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso Books, 1979).
Music:
Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
Comments
Unrelated to this episode but you should consider doing an episode on Isaiah Berlin - would love to hear your take on his ideas.
Nigel H.
2023-12-17 11:36:59 +0000 UTCSeconded
Justin Thomas
2023-12-14 13:42:07 +0000 UTCRead the Anderson essay on Fukuyama. It is the last essay in a Zone of Engagement, which can be found on libgen. If you're not viscerally enraged, then I would suggest reading Endnotes. You should start with their L. A. Theses and then try and swallow their condensed history of class struggle: A History of Separation. Unlike them, I do not belong to the Bakunin-Kaczynski Institute of Technology and I'm not as pessimistic as they are about the constraints on the SPD and think that a proper history should be 10 times longer, but this is the only account of history that deals with the political and social history adequately. If you still have an appetite, then you might want to look through the rest of Endnotes.
cole cecchetto
2023-12-07 19:23:26 +0000 UTCAny recs for what you’re talking about towards the end? Would love to read some of them.
Jack Arens
2023-12-07 18:55:52 +0000 UTCThe condemnation in this book really has to be followed up with Anderson's take on the End of History where he says that the real movement has been obliterated, quite possibly forever, and that the only responses for socialists are surrender, melancholic self-indulgence, or some sort of substitutionism that radically changes either the agent of liberation or the shape of liberation itself. Dude became a very erudite discipline; Adorno turned out to not be wrong, just ahead of the curve. Not sure I agree with their pessimism in the long term, but I think that the naïveté of the Internationals, about the workers' transparently revolutionary interest or genuine mass politics always being ultimately progressive. The sharpest communist analyses of contemporary life have incorporated some of the arguments of Western Marxists about changes in the class relation, worries about fragmentation due to extensive growth and the PMC, as well as attempts to define Marx's 'method,' ie: value-form theory. Great episode. I really liked where this one went.
cole cecchetto
2023-12-07 00:05:23 +0000 UTCon it because it's unique among the sciences because you can't isolate variables, you can't hold your theoretical framework in isolation or remove yourself from a participatory learning. Rather, one is compelled to expand their subjectivity, to be a historical subject that is not receiving class consciousness from without, they are injecting it through their being into the world, into the self-conscious society to be. The speculative notion must be made actual!
Philip M
2023-12-06 20:11:10 +0000 UTCOne of your best, really uplifting to see this conversation being had in a very self-conscious and thoughtful way. If I may share some thoughts of my own, I understand Marx to have been doing something more than synthesis, more than thinking globally. There are plenty of bourgeois intellectuals that talk about systems theory, who deride class politics as being mechanical and lacking empiricism, and claim to be coherent and grounded thanks to the objectivity of some calculus. This has been enabled by the academic left losing conviction that Marxism has discovered things simply as they are, they have ceded theory to being a matter of mere interpretation much like the very philosophical arguments between theoretical physicists talking about specters like Wigner's friend. Ultimately, they are doing imaginary battle and that is an abandonment of the primacy of historical materialism. The philosophical necessity for Marx was historical consciousness. One can't have class consciousness if they can't apprehend how one has been shaped into their evolving circumstances. This is what definitively distinguishes Marxism from some common populism, Marxism doesn't make an appeal to regress to some ideal prefigured social order, and this has been lost in the academic discourse of western Marxism, it's been lost in how the western left has been unable to think on its feet and respond with an intuition that truly can immerse itself in the aufhebung of necessity and contingency rather than them being antagonistic. Marxism evades the analytic methodology that has been attempted to be imposed
Philip M
2023-12-06 20:06:27 +0000 UTCAlways thought this text was pretty much on the nail. And I suspect Mills' discovery that when Marx labelled philosophers as ideologists, he didn't mean just some (German, metaphysical idealist) philosophers, but all philosophers, contributed to his own (Mills) eventual abandoment of Marxism. I could see it would be a bitter pill to swallow for would-be Marxist philosophy academics. It is what it is. But the one point I wanted to come back on was Lilian's generalisation from her German and Netherlands experience that all European leftism is defined by hatred of their national working class. This is a specific German toxicity (that expands to countries historically dominated by the "autonomensphere", like Netherlands, to some extent Denmark, and to a lesser extent the other Scandis). It is not the case in France, Italy, Spain, etc. Or even the UK and Ireland for that matter. The first generation of Anti-Imperialist autonomen despised the German working class for being Nazis or willing collabos, the later gens, for supporting imperialist violence like Vietnam and celebrating the Wirtschaftwunder, etc. The Antideutsche of course disagreed with the Anti-imps on jest about everything, apart from the fundamental depravity and historical evil of the German working class. It's a particular historical dynamic that doesn't extend particularly to the rest of Europe, outside of the 80s squatter-zone Antiimp (*cough* RAF *cough*) rear bases in Holland and Denmark
Paul Bowman
2023-12-05 18:01:06 +0000 UTCThis podcast rocks so hard. You all are truly so brilliant
Nic Johnson
2023-12-05 17:34:36 +0000 UTCit's on the list! (the list is too long!)
Gil Morejon
2023-12-05 15:23:16 +0000 UTCthis podcast is so great and also now i really really would love a pedagogy of the oppressed episode
Elliot S.
2023-12-05 15:22:29 +0000 UTCMarxist disciplines ranked by how useful they are: 1. Political economy 2. History … 976. Philosophy
pelicans123
2023-12-05 14:04:04 +0000 UTC
