Boris Kagarlitsky
The Suicide of New Left Review
For forty years, New Left Review was a symbol for the radical
intelligentsia throughout the world. The articles carried in it were
more successful or less so, and the points of view presented in it
were astonishing for their superficial radicalism or for their
toothless moderation. Nevertheless, for all leftists who read
English, the journal remained a source of information on contemporary
Marxism. New names appeared on its pages, and discussions of
fundamental importance revolved around views expressed there.
Although NLR was published in Britain, and most of its authors were
based there or in the US, it was not only open to writers from other
countries, but in its essence, approach, structure and ideology,
constitued an international publication. Now, this journal is no
more. There is another journal which bears the same name, but this
latter periodical is fundamentally different, based on a
diametrically opposite concept. From January 2000, New Left Review
changed its editor, design and numbering. Before us we have number
one, a little exercise-book formated in post-modernist style. The
sub-head "Second Series" seems to presume that the journal will
survive for another forty years, and that there will perhaps be a
third and fourth series. The change of concept is declared in a
foreword by Perry Anderson, under the expressive heading "Renewals".
Perry Anderson, who succeeds Robin Blackburn as editor, is not
someone new to NLR. He was present at the very birth of the journal.
The makeup of the editorial board is also practically unchanged. We
are not talking about an infusion of fresh blood; quite the reverse.
Before us we have the same old collective, who have decided to change
their program and ideology. It is no accident that the word "new" has
come into fashion along with the rise of politicians such as Tony
Blair and Gerhard Schroeder. In the 1960s the "new left" had a very
clear system of principles that distinguished it from the "old left",
embodied in social democracy and communism. Meanwhile, this political
definition served to make clear that the new and old left had
something in common. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the
situation has changed. The idea of the new is used as a substitute
for all other ideas, as a symbolic replacement for any positive
identification and as an incantation freeing those who utter it from
responsibility before the past and future (and at times, from their
consciences as well). Anything whatever is justified on the basis of
its novelty. To be new, however, does not mean to be better.
Moreover, and much more important, "new" does not signify "final".
The new becomes the old, and the old, once it has been thoroughly
forgotten, becomes the new. References to a "new" program and "new"
ideas are featured precisely when people lack the intellectual and
political courage to declare openly just what this program and these
ideas consist of (or when both program and ideas are lacking). It is
quite clear that Perry Anderson is not a supporter of Tony Blair, as
he prudently forewarns us in his preface. In Anderson's view,
Blairism differs little from neo-liberalism. Precisely for this
reason, the victory of Blair, Schroeder and similar "new social
democrats" is proof of the complete and final triumph of
neo-liberalism on a global scale. According to Anderson, the old
project of transforming the world, the project which inspired the
founders of NLR in earlier times, has been exhausted. Not because the
world has changed, but because there is nothing that can be done
about neo-liberalism and capitalism. All attempts at bringing about
fundamental change have failed. Society has undergone a
consolidation. All that remains for the left is to observe this and
to take pleasure in thinking critically about it. Consequently, NLR
as well has to renounce the old traditions and renew itself, adapting
to the circumstances that have arisen. Perry Anderson, a
sophisticated British gentleman, sits in his cosy office at no. 6
Meard Street and limply discusses the collapse of the left project.
He has enough intellectual honesty not to repudiate his radical past
or the ideals of his youth, but he is impassive enough not to lament
their collapse. Despite Anderson's readiness to bury the left project
of the 1960s, and along with it the first-series NLR, his foreword
contains not a paragraph or even a sentence devoted to political
self-criticism. Everything was fine. Both when Perry together with
other young radicals tried to revolutionise social thinking and
political life in Britain, and now, when he no longer proposes to
overturn anything whatever. And what, in reality, has happened? What
particular suffering has beset these people? Have Western
intellectuals really lost anything, apart from their principles?
No-one has been thrown in prison or put in front of a firing squad.
Their homes have not been blown up, nor their cities bombed. They are
not tear-gassed on the streets, they have no problems making ends
meet, and they need not stoop to begging publishers to give them free
copies of books they cannot afford to buy. Such things are part of
the everyday experience of people not just in Eastern Europe and the
Third World, but also in the flourishing West. None of this, however,
affects the academic elite in any way. For Anderson, the history of
socialism is the history of ideas, and furthermore, of ideas that
have gone out of fashion. Gramsci has lost his attraction, and Sartre
has been forgotten. The new editor of NLR writes of this without
regret, while remaining completely unashamed of his radical past,
just as a prosperous businesswoman is not ashamed of having worn
ragged jeans during her student years. Times change, and so do
fashions. As a counterweight to utopian calls for changing society,
and to hopes of revolution, Perry offers "uncompromising realism".
What is the essence of this realism? Accepting the truth of any
garbage at all, provided it is published in the Wall Street Journal.
Apart from affirming the collapse of the left movement, the article
says nothing of substance. In essence, there is no analysis here.
There are neither reflections on the nature of modern capitalism, nor
efforts to understand the dynamic and contradictions of
globalisation. The "analysis" boils down to recapitulating mainstream
editorials; the picture of the world offered by the Wall Street
Journal and the Economist is taken for granted, without even the
slightest effort at critical reading. At best, this recalls the
classic school exercise: read through and retell in your own words.
The main source of inspiration in this case is commentators of the
neo-liberal school; Perry does not hide his admiration for them. The
left, he considers, is now incapable of proposing anything "new". "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" (p. 19). It is revealing how
Anderson's words repeat, almost verbatim, utterances of Communist
Party of the Russian Federation leader Gennady Zyuganov, who has set
out to establish in this way the "modernity" of his racist,
nationalist and anti-Marxist positions. But this is not what the
debate is ultimately about. One might, of course, consider that
Huntington has a better style than Anderson, though to be honest I
cannot see any difference. The essence, however, lies elsewhere. We
are not talking about who commands a bigger print run, or whose
sentence structure is more felicitous. In any case, the left has
never been short of commentators and popularisers. What is really
involved is theoretical discussion requiring a certain intellectual
level, and here Fukuyama and Huntington are completely helpless.
Twenty years ago, no intellectual considered Brzezinski a serious
theoretician. Now, alongside Huntington and the half-forgotten
Fukuyama, he has become almost a spiritual mentor for the
intellectuals. The success enjoyed by these authors has nothing to do
with their merits as thinkers. This is why the phenomenon is so
interesting in sociological and culturological terms. This needs to
be thought and written about, but Anderson has no intention of doing
so. Moreover, he clearly does not intend to allow such absurd and
"outmoded" discussions into his journal. Uncompromising realism
consists in the absence of the slightest attempt at critical
thinking. Marx considered that philosophers explained the wor ld,
while the need was to change it. Anderson considers that it is not
necessary even to explain the world, but that it is enough to
describe it. In essence, what we have before us is a very refined,
gentlemanly form of unconditional capitulation to an ideological foe.
Perry breaks his sword and surrenders himself to the mercy of the
victor, but as a true gentleman he does this with dignity and style.
He does not reflect, of course, on what the victorious enemy will
then do with his "territorial forces". The ideologue shuts himself
away voluntarily in his "ivory tower". The rest of us, remaining
outside, are of no interest to him. Such thinking is born of a total
lack of contact with the real movement, and at the same time, is used
to justify the lack of such contact. The left movement is in crisis,
but precisely for this reason, radical action and critical thought
are essential as never before. There is a need for an overarching
strategy, for principled positions - in the final analysis, for
ethical foundations. In place of this, Perry discusses in detail the
rules for footnotes in the "renewed" NLR, then goes on to inform us
that from now on the journal's authors will not necessarily be from
the ranks of the left. All that remains is to change the name to New
Left-Right Review. It is obvious that a gentleman cannot be a labour
organiser or a street fighter (though curiously enough, this was
possible twenty years ago). No-one, however, is demanding that "left"
professors mix it with police on the streets. It would be quite
satisfactory if they were to busy themselves with their accepted
task: thinking critically. Admiration for rightists and calls for
intellectual union with them (to judge from everything, on the basis
of their positions) is the perfectly logical consequence of a
fundamental approach at whose heart is a refusal to critically
analyse the myths of neo-liberal capitalism. Perry has not only
managed to ignore the crisis of neo-liberalism in the late 1990s
(despite the Russian default, the Zapatista uprising in Mexico, and
in the US, the rise of a new mass left movement that demonstrated its
strength on the streets of Seattle in the autumn of 1999). He even
waxes ironic over writers who have observed these phenomena! The
crisis of neo-liberalism would be far more acute were it not for the
cowardice and treachery of a significant section of the left. The
treachery has historical roots, such as the capitulation of the
Second International in 1914, but this does not change the ethical
character of what has occurred. In one of the stories of Yevgeny
Shvarts it is remarked: we have all studied in the school of evil,
but who forced you to be a star pupil? The "renewed" leftists have
turned out to be the star pupils in the school of neo-liberalism.
From this it follows that a renewal of the left is indispensable. Not
in the mongrel Blair-Schroeder-Zyuganov sense, but on the level of a
decisive and uncompromising break with such "renewers", and of a turn
to the mass movement that is assembling literally before our eyes.
The need for an alternative ideology, directed against
neo-liberalism, is extremely acute. The radicalism and protest have
to acquire a theoretical basis. It would seem to be just the time for
the intellectuals to make an impact. But alas, they have nothing to
make an impact with.... The most amusing part of Perry's editorial is
its conclusion, where he declares, with impeccable political
correctness, that he would welcome more non-Western contributions.
Here, he continues to rebuke the "old" NLR, which, in his view,
failed to open its pages sufficiently to representatives of the
non-Western and non-English-speaking world. It is enough, however, to
take from one's shelves a selection of the "old" NLR to find that the
reality was quite different. NLR published authors from Latin
America, Eastern Europe, South Korea, India and Africa. For the "new"
NLR, meanwhile, serious problems in this regard are inevitable. Why
should people from the non-Western world write for a journal that is
demonstratively indifferent to the vital questions of their
existence? Why should authors who do not belong to the inner circle
of trans-Atlantic intellectuals collaborate with a journal whose
positions are alien and hostile to them? Perry laments the
intellectual narcissism of Anglo-Saxon culture, while himself
manifesting it to the fullest extent. A true gentleman, of course, is
ready to give a hearing to foreign ideas, but we foreigners are
assigned the role of a politically correct decoration, or still
worse, of "civilised natives", who are required to insert themselves
into a ready-made cultural context. It is a quite different matter
that there is absolutely no intellectual point to such an operation;
why publish foreign authors if they are no different from your own?
In an old Soviet joke, the head of the personnel department says: "If
we give a job to Rabinovich, don't expect he won't be a Jew." Here it
is just the same. If you want to publish authors from the
"periphery", then don't be surprised if they are unimpressed with the
vanity and intellectual feebleness of Western ex-radicals. The "old"
NLR did not meet with problems as a result of being published in the
West, since it was internationalist in its concept, in its view of
the world. The "new" NLR admits from the outset its character as a
thoroughly provincial publication, since such a journal is of
interest to no-one apart from a few hundred former radicals scattered
around god-forsaken American university campuses. The "old" NLR had
something to teach us non-Western leftists, since it represented
everything that was best in radical European and American culture. In
this sense, the more Anglo-Saxon the journal was, the more
interesting we in other countries found it. The "renewed" NLR, to
judge from Perry's editorial, will scarcely be able to offer us
anything apart from a retelling, "in its own words", of the articles
in the Economist and the Wall Street Journal. But why do we need a
retelling, when we can have the original? Politically correct
multicultural discourse has nothing in common with a dialogue between
cultures. I have no interest in reading a British journal in order to
find out the attitude of a fashionable French critic to the modern
Chinese cinema. This does not mean that the cinema is unimportant, or
that the sociology of culture is uninteresting. The point is simply
that there are dozens of journals in English that analyse these
matters better, in more detail, more professionally, and most
important, without political-intellectual intermediaries. The "old"
NLR was an international journal of modern Marxist theory and
political analysis, a meeting-place for socialist intellectuals. From
Perry's point of view, this project is dead. Millions of people think
differently. This, however, is not the point; one person can be
right, while millions are mistaken. The point is different: why do we
need New Left Review, when the editor himself has cheerfully and
triumphantly buried the original project? If Perry Anderson felt the
need for a new journal with a thrust different from the earlier NLR,
it would have been more honest for him simply to have shut down the
former publication and to have begun a new one. I am reluctant to
think that the main reason for keeping the title was a wish to hold
onto a familiar brand name. But in acting as he did, Anderson
consciously or unconsciously dealt a profound personal affront to
large numbers of people whose political and intellectual positions
took shape under the influence of New Left Review. By transferring
the old name to a new journal, Perry stole a part of our common past,
of our shared history. This can no longer be forgiven. It is good
that the design and numbering have been changed; here, Anderson has
shown his professional honesty. For substantial numbers of authors
and readers, this will act as a signal. A familiar, well-loved
journal no longer exists. It has died, or more precisely, its own
parents have killed it. The new journal can seek new readers for
itself - among the subscribers to the Wall Street Journal.