Mark Jones http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
> Sent: 03 May 2000 18:48
> To: lbo-talk
> Subject: Kagarlitsky v New Left Review
>
>
> [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.
>
>