> On Mon, 25 Apr 2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> ...I don't know what's become of it in recent years. What do other
>> people think?
>
> I find the articles almost always interesting in their breadth of topic
> and depth of analysis. Anderson himself is insightful on everything from
> American elections to Taiwanese separatism. For those who don't know
> what's become of it in recent years, here's a description of the current
> issue. --CGE
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I haven't seen anything lately by Perry Anderson - or, for that matter, by
Eric Hobsbawm or Tariq Ali - that I haven't agreed with. But that's because
I accept their view that the near simultaneous collapse of the USSR and
political transformation of China - and the lift this has given the world
capitalist economy - have shaken the Marxist characterization of the epoch
as a revolutionary one to its foundations; that it is necessary to confront
these wholly unanticipated reversals; that a materialist outlook remains the
most reliable means of doing so; and that the exercise can provoke
disappointing course adjustments based on less hopeful conclusions.
This has brought them opprobrium from the faithful "optimists of the will" on the left who have tended to pass over the world-shaking developments of recent decades in the same way clerics, consciously or otherwise, steer clear of debating the existence of God because it can produce doubt. I do suspect Anderson may have an exaggerated respect for Federic Jamieson and postmodernism, but I haven't read widely enough in that area that I'd want to pursue the point. In any case, I can forgive Anderson most anything for his mid-70's classic, Considerations on Western Marxism, essentially tracing the idealist and voluntarist character of that part of the tradition to the early failure of the Western proletariat to fulfill its assigned role as agent of revolutionary change.
MG