Kagarlitsky v New Left Review

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed May 3 10:47:54 PDT 2000


[apologies for the unparagraphed formatting]

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.



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