#perry anderson

[zwischenstadt]

In academic historical leftist circles, there’s a temptation to endlessly replay the chess moves of classical revolutionary periods—the Comintern, the CCP’s alignment with the Nationalists, the decisions of the German Republic during the early Weimar years. In The Deluge, I indulged in that historical game myself. In the historical reenactment I played out the role of a hard-nosed, Keynesian, left-liberal unafraid to accept responsibility for violence. I regret that I indulged in that historical time warp myself. Not because I adopted a position different from that approved of by Anderson, but because I indulged in the game at all, and thus opened the door to his critique. I allowed myself to slide out of the more urgent domain of the present into the time-warped present of the academic ivory tower, in which now is 1924 and 1924 is now. I allowed myself to be sucked into an unproductive argument about a history that is no longer ours. This, I have come to feel, is a kind of escapism. If we were in a revolutionary moment that would be one thing. But we are absolutely not. So, very little is gained for understanding present-day politics by engaging in a historical Disneyland where we cosplay as Lenin, Trotsky, Wilson, imagining who we would have been and what we would have done. That’s playing at history. It’s the kind of boyish stuff people play on computers. We need to grow up. There’s too much at stake in the world right now. Things are too urgent. We need to be in the present, as best we can, fully engaged in medias res.

Adam Tooze, "On Thinking in media res"

[howieabel]

“Thirty years later, his regime had accomplished its historical task. Economic development had transformed Spanish society, radical mass politics had been extinguished, and democracy was no longer hazardous for capital. So completely had the dictatorship done its work that a toothless Bourbon socialism was incapable even of restoring the republic it had overthrown. In this Spanish laboratory could be found a parabola of the future, which the Latin American dictators of the 1970s – Pinochet is the exemplary case – would repeat, architects of a political order in which electors, grateful for civic liberties finally restored, could be trusted henceforward not to tamper with the social order. Today the Spanish template has become the general formula of freedom: no longer making the world safe for democracy, but democracy safe for this world.” ― Perry Anderson

[thelonguepuree]

In the advanced capitalist world today, it is the seeming absence of any such prospect as a proximate or even distant horizon—the lack, apparently, of any conjecturable alternative to the imperial status quo of a consumer capitalism—that blocks the likelihood of any profound cultural renovation comparable to the great Age of Aesthetic Discoveries in the first third of this century. Gramsci’s words still hold good: ‘The crisis consists,’ he wrote, ‘precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.’ It is legitimate to ask, however: could anything be said in advance as to what the new might be? One thing, I think, might be predicted. Modernism as a notion is the emptiest of all cultural categories. Unlike the terms Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Mannerist, Romantic or Neo-Classical, it designates no describable object in its own right at all: it is completely lacking in positive content. In fact, as we have seen, what is concealed beneath the label is a wide variety of very diverse—indeed incompatible—aesthetic practices: symbolism, constructivism, expressionism, surrealism. These, which do spell out specific programmes, were unified post hoc in a portmanteau concept whose only referent is the blank passage of time itself. There is no other aesthetic marker so vacant or vitiated. For what once was modern is soon obsolete. The futility of the term, and its attendant ideology, can be seen all too clearly from current attempts to cling to its wreckage and yet swim with the tide still further beyond it, in the coinage ‘post-modernism’: one void chasing another, in a serial regression of self-congratulatory chronology. If we ask ourselves, what would revolution (understood as a punctual and irreparable break with the order of capital) have to do with modernism (understood as this flux of temporal vanities), the answer is: it would surely end it. For a genuine socialist culture would be one which did not insatiably seek the new, defined simply as what comes later, itself to be rapidly consigned to the detritus of the old, but rather one which multiplied the different, in a far greater variety of concurrent styles and practices than had ever existed before: a diversity founded on the far greater plurality and complexity of possible ways of living that any free community of equals, no longer divided by class, race or gender, would create. The axes of aesthetic life would, in other words, in this respect run horizontally, not vertically. The calendar would cease to tyrannize, or organize, consciousness of art. The vocation of a socialist revolution, in that sense, would be neither to prolong nor to fulfil modernity, but to abolish it.

Perry Anderson, from “Modernity and Revolution” (1984)

[sunflowerim]

Just watched the deleted scenes of Dead Poets Society and the scene between Neil and Todd!! them running lines and having fun!! should NOT have been cut. It's so beautiful.

[weil-weil-lautre]

[Perry Anderson] only has eyes for world-historical Revolutions in politics and world-class Masterpieces in culture; he stakes out his claim on heights of metaphysical perfection, and won't deign to notice anything less. This would be all right, I guess, except that he's so clearly miserable over the lack of company up there. It might be more fruitful if, instead of demanding whether modernity can still produce masterpieces and revolutions, we were to ask whether it can generate sources and spaces of meaning, of freedom, dignity, beauty, joy, solidarity. Then we would have to confront the messy actuality in which modern men and women and children live. The air might be less pure, but the atmosphere would be a lot more nourishing; we would find, in Gertrude Stein's phrase, a lot more there there. Who knows - it's impossible to know in advance - we might even find some masterpieces or revolutions in the making. This isn't Anderson's problem alone. I think it's an occupational hazard for intellectuals, regardless of their politics, to lose touch with the stuff and flow of everyday life. But this is a special problem for intellectuals on the Left, because we, among all political movements, take special pride in noticing people, respecting them, listening to their voices, caring about their needs, brining them together, fighting for their freedom and happiness. (This is how we differ - or try to differ - from the world's assorted ruling classes and their ideologues, who treat the people they rule as animals or machines or numbers or pieces on a chessboard or who ignore their existence completely, or who dominate them all by playing them against each other, teaching them that they can be free and happy only at each other's expense.)

Marshsall Berman, Adventures in Marxism, 168-169

[falanster-spb]

Новая книга от одного из лучших современных марксистских историков: Перри Андерсон «Перипетии гегемонии» Гегемония – одно из тех редких слов, которые широко используются в литературе по международным отношениям и политологии, но при этом среди исследователей нет согласия относительно их точного значения. В первом полноценном историческом исследовании понятия «гегемония» известный британский историк Перри Андерсон прослеживает его истоки в Древней Греции, его повторное открытие во время волнений 1848–1849 годов в Германии, а затем причудливую судьбу в революционной России, фашистской Италии, Америке времен холодной войны, тэтчеровской Британии, постколониальной Индии, феодальной Японии, маоистском Китае вплоть до мира Меркель, Мэй, Буша и Обамы. 310 р. Купить с доставкой по России и миру через наш сайт: https://bit.ly/2kVDE3A через товары вк: https://bit.ly/2LBaMsM

[zwischenstadt]

In contrast, my approach, because I'm a liberal and therefore, as [Perry Anderson] sees it, also situational or occasional, simply latches onto particular moments. He describes my work as being formulated “in medias res, ” in the midst of things. He sees me as a left-liberal with a problem regarding structure, and he views this as a deficiency—a gap, a blind spot in my thinking. I would simply respond that I do have an intellectual problem with structure. But that is not a weakness or simple failure on my part. As our preceding discussion about polycrisis, Latour, Beck etc suggested I have a necessarily incomplete but nevertheless capacious historical explanation for why structure is at this particular moment not transparently given to us. This is necessarily formulate in in medias res. And my question back to him would be: how can anyone who considers themselves a Marxist intellectual believe that they think and act in anything other than in medias res? How can a materialist imagine they are not in medias res? We are thrown into history, living in history in medias res—that’s not a choice, nor a methodological stance. It’s our fate; it’s an existential condition. Frankly, I see his stance as an expression of a degenerate academic Marxism that imagines itself perched in some ivory tower, observing the world and understanding the deep structures of history from a privileged vantage point. That is no more or less in medias res. It is just a particularly precious, secluded angle from which to view the world. My own preference is to dispense with that conceit and to own, embrace, tackle and engage with what is everyone’s condition: i.e. being within the system, within the world. We are endogenous to that world. From this perspective, at any given moment, the question is what structures are relevant to our analysis. This is the Latourian move again: you tell me what your crisis is or what your context is, and I’ll tell you who and where you are—or vice versa.

Adam Tooze, interviewed by Ding Xiongfei

[howieabel]

“In 2005, when Congress still depended on Communist votes for a majority in Parliament, a National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was passed, assuring any household in the countryside a hundred days labour a year at the legal minimum wage on public works, with at least a third of these jobs for women. It is work for pay, rather than a direct cash transfer scheme as in Brazil, to minimize the danger of money going to those who are not actually the poor, and so ensure it reaches only those willing to do the work. Denounced by all right-thinking opinion as debilitating charity behind a façade of make-work, it was greeted by the middle-class like ‘a wet dog at a glamorous party’, in the words of one of its architects, the Belgian-Indian economist Jean Drèze. Unlike the Bolsa Família in Brazil, the application of NREGA was left to state governments rather than the centre, so its impact has been very uneven and incomplete, wages often paid lower than the legal minimum, for days many fewer than a hundred.Works performed are not always durable, and as with all other social programmes in India, funds are liable to local malversation. But in scale NREGA now represents the largest entitlement programme in the world, reaching some 40 million rural households, a quarter of the total in the country. Over half of these dalit or adivasi, and 48 per cent of its beneficiaries are women – double their share of casual labour in the private sector. Such is the demand for employment by NREGA in the countryside that it far outruns supply. A National Survey Sample for 2009–2010 has revealed that 45 per cent of all rural households wanted the work it offers, of whom only 56 per cent got it. What NREGA has started to do, in the formulation Drèze has taken from Ambedkar, is break the dictatorship of the private employer in the countryside, helping by its example to raise wages even of non-recipients. Since inception, its annual cost has risen from $2.5 to over $8 billion, a token of its popularity. This remains less than 1 per cent of GDP, and the great majority of rural labourers in the private sector are still not paid the minimum wage due them. Conceived outside the party system, and accepted by Congress only when it had little expectation of winning the elections of 2004, the Act eventually had such popular demand behind it that the Lok Sabha adopted it nem con. Three years later, with typical dishonesty, the Manmohan regime renamed it as ‘Gandhian’ to fool the masses that Congress inspired it.” ― Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology