The following paper was read by Santiago Roggerone at the panel discussion “Challenging Perry Anderson and the categorisation of Soviet vs Western Western Marxism,” with D. W. Kamish, Daniel Allen, Lori Torner, and Roggerone as panelists, and Panagiotis Sotiris as chair, last 10 November 2024 at Historical Materialism’s Twenty-first annual conference in London.
Western Marxism in an (even more) expanded field?
Based on Walter Benjamin’s critique of historicism, Martin Jay has recently set out to rethink the narrative strategies used to tell the story of the so-called Frankfurt School. This remarkable effort, indebted to the art critic Rosalind Krauss and her pioneering idea of an expanded field, ties in with what the American intellectual historian had previously done in Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (1984). In this book, the well-known enlarged camp proposed by Francis Rory Peregrine ‘Perry’ Anderson in Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), where neo-Hegelians like Georg Lukács and anti-Hegelians like Louis Althusser find themselves on common ground, was celebrated and reinforced through the Wittgensteinian concept of family resemblances (Familienähnlichkeit).
In critical dialogue with Jay and his current recommendation to avoid traditional accounts of evolutionary development, and expand fields in order to include episodes from different narratives and put them in constellation with the present, in what follows I aim to revisit and reassess Anderson’s canonical categorisation of Western Marxism. Building on the criticism, found in multiple classical and contemporary scholarly works, on the applicability, scope, and accuracy of Anderson’s essay, I will focus on its underlying assumptions, limitations, and blind spots. This will allow me to critically address the enlarged camp that was celebrated and reinforced once by Jay as a problematic sum of imprecisions, ambivalences, and ultimately prejudices.
Additionally, in this presentation I will seek to answer the key question of whether the expansion of an already expanded field like that of Western Marxism is relevant for the understanding of the historical complexities of Marxist theoretical-practical tradition. In this path, Anderson’s Considerations will be placed in series not only with previous efforts like those of Karl Korsch’s or Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s but also with contemporary alternative categorisations such as André Tosel’s mille marxismes or Razming Keucheyan’s new critical theories.
As is well known, Western Marxism typically refers to ‘certain currents of Marxist philosophy that developed in Western Europe after the First World War, and which it distinguished itself (or opposes to) “Eastern” or Soviet Marxist orthodoxy’.[1] Generally acknowledged for shifting ‘the emphases of Marxism from political economy and the state to culture, philosophy and art’, the term is believed to have been coined in 1927 by Alexander Schifrin, a German-Russian Menshevik journalist, publicist, and political theorist who wrote under the pseudonyms Herbert Röhn and Max Werner.[2] Schifrin’s denouncement of the degeneration of Russian Marxism into a state ideology inspired Korsch, who in his 1930 Marxism and Philosophy (1923)’s ‘Anti-Critique’, employed the notion ‘Western Marxism’ to ‘counterpose the dialectical materialist “method” to the substantive results achieved by applying it to philosophy and the sciences’.[3] Twenty five years later, Merleau-Ponty drew upon Korsch and others’ efforts and revived the term to encompass an entire underground tradition of dialectical, humanist, subjectivist, heretical, and non-dogmatic Marxism.
Although not explicitly acknowledged, Merleau-Ponty’s Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) significantly influenced Anderson. Nonetheless, Anderson’s primary inspiration appears to have been Italian rather than French. Apart from Antonio Gramsci’s implicit West-East contrast, two key references stand out: Sebastiano Timpanao, who in a 1966 essay not coincidentally entitled ‘Considerations on Materialism’ noted that Western Marxism’s primary concern is defending itself ‘against the accusation of materialism’, and particularly Lucio Colletti.[4] In Considerations on Western Marxism, Colletti, still influenced by Galvano della Volpe’s ideas, stood out for his exceptional clarity regarding the ‘nature and limits’ of the Western Marxist tradition, which Anderson was then examining.[5]
Also building on Isaac Deutscher’s idea of a contrasting classical Marxism, and the more general perspective of an imaginary Trotskyism whose sole tangible expression seemed to be the work of Ernest Mandel, Considerations on Western Marxism would become Anderson’s most renowned contribution. Considered part of an unpremeditated series of historical-intellectual studies on Marxism – which included subsequent works such as the 1977 essay on Gramsci’s antinomies, Arguments within English Marxism (1980), In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1983), and a 1998 impressive analysis of Fredric Jameson’s oeuvre – Anderson’s book constituted a formidable intervention. Although works like Jameson’s Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1974) had previously explored part of the tradition in the English-speaking world, Anderson’s Considerations made a remarkably original contribution, which to this day remains unparalleled. Originally conceived in 1974 as the introductory reflections for an edited volume that would bring together various materials that had previously appeared in the New Left Review with the aim of revitalising British Marxist culture, the essay was eventually published as a stand-alone book in 1976.
I will skip the reconstruction of Anderson’s argument and focus on the work’s impact. Following its publication, the book quickly gained widespread recognition within the academic community, receiving reviews in various journals and subsequent translations into French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Because, as Jay suggested, ‘[t]here are no easy ways to map the rugged and shifting terrain of the intellectual territory known as Western Marxism’, controversy soon surrounded the essay.[6] Ultimately, Western Marxism is a problematic notion – a ‘label’, as José Guilherme Merquior once pointed out, which ‘turns out to be a tricky one’; ‘a catch-all’ term that Kevin B. Anderson, in retrospect, admits was ‘ill-chosen’.[7]
The main account of the impact caused by Anderson’s Considerations is not E.P. Thompson’s well-known criticisms or the various academic studies on Western Marxism in a broad sense that began appearing in the late 1970s. The most significant evidence of this impact comes from Anderson’s own crucial reconsideration of Considerations, presented in In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. Indeed, the publication of Anderson’s 1982 René Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine, as a short book, signals the consolidation of an entire field of study.
This field, with far-reaching implications beyond academia, has remained vibrant for over four decades. Over this period, various studies on Western Marxism and its key theoretical substitutes have emerged, shaped by global collaborative efforts. Within the context of this peculiar scholarship, mappings and approaches to contemporary Marxist thought exhibit a predominantly nominalist analytical mode, distinguished by openness and non-sectarianism. Indeed, to capture the specificity of recent theoretical developments, historiographical and analytical approaches over the last few decades have favoured concepts like late Marxism, global Marxism, thousand Marxisms, or new critical theories, rather than relying solely on the allegedly narrow notion of Western Marxism.
One of the current contributions to this peculiar field is Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism: How it Was Born, How it Died, How it Can Be Reborn (2024 [2017]). In this book, Losurdo tackles the enduring issue of the theory-practice divide, engaging in an anachronistic polemic with Anderson and providing one of the most recent commentaries on the topic of Western Marxism. The late Italian historian was a prominent figure among theorists exploring the missed encounter between Marxism and peripheral, marginal, or border regions of capitalism, highlighting the colonial or even imperialist unconscious present in the ideas of certain purportedly radical Western thinkers.
As David Broder observes in his insightful commentary for the New Left Review, Losurdo presents a Manichean account where Eastern Marxism serves merely as a foil to condemn a Western Marxist tradition for abandoning the anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, nationalist, and Third Word revolutions of the Twentieth century. In this milieu, Anderson and his Considerations are criticized for disseminating an ideology within the Western Left, which paradoxically has fuelled a tragic disconnect between Marxist theory and the practice of global anti-colonialist revolution.
From Losurdo’s predominantly neo-Stalinist perspective, Anderson appears to be a convenient scapegoat, allowing avoidance of a direct engagement with Trotsky, who is prominently portrayed as an avant la lettre Western Marxist critic of Eastern Marxism’s theoretical and political degeneration. Nevertheless, this fact does not exonerate Anderson from accusations of Eurocentrism. As various critics have noted, he limited his scope of Western Marxism to select contributions from authors in West Germany, France, and Italy, neglecting the possibility that heterodox critiques of vulgar Marxism had emerged in the East or the so-called Third World. Moreover, it is undisputable that the idea of a missed encounter between Marxism and capitalist peripheries retains significant explanatory potential. Issues arise when, under the banners of dialectical contradiction and critique of purity fetish, one adopts extravagant and inconsistent stances, such as those advocated by Losurdo and other contemporary and neo-Stalinists.
I am thinking here of Carlos L. Garrido, author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), and notably Gabriel Rockhill, editor of the recent English translation of Losurdo’s aforementioned 2017 work and author of the forthcoming book, Who Pay the Pipers of Western Marxism? In Rockhill’s introductory study to Losurdo’s book, co-authored with Jennifer Ponce de León, it becomes evident that the Italian historian’s insights serve to validate the author’s own perspective. Introducing Losurdo’s work, Ponce de León and Rockhill state that
[w]hat the Western Marxists […] share in common […] is their promotion by the U.S.-driven theory industry as the most radical theory on offer. As a result, their work provides the historical foundation and referential basis for so many of the commodities produced by the business of contemporary theory in the imperial core.[8]
This type of criticism, which in undoubtedly part of a broader campist conspiranoid trope, ‘applies mutatis mutandis to many other trends promoted by the [so-called] theory industry […], including postcolonial theory, decolonial theory, liberal feminist and queer theory, Afro-pessimism, and so forth’.[9] Since Considerations is regarded by Ponce de León and Rockhill as ‘a repository for many of […Western Marxist] major themes’ – namely, ‘idealism and the primacy of theory, Eurocentric social chauvinism in the sense of an attitude of patronizing cultural superiority, the dogmatic rejection of actually existing socialism, a politics of defeat based on historical misrepresentations, a wilful dilution of Marxism with bourgeois theory and petty-bourgeois theoretical practices, a celebration of marketable novelty at the expense of practical relevance, and self-promotional opportunism that perpetuates cultural imperialism and disdain for Marxism in the Global South’ – Anderson becomes the primary target of authors’ attack.[10]
In my opinion, other recent reassessments of the classical British historian’s essay have proved far more relevant. In his 2023 afterword to a new German edition of Considerations, provocatively titled ‘Perry Anderson’s Confrontation with Western Marxism as a Reflection of its/his Failure’ (‘Perry Andersons Auseinandersetzung mit dem westlichen Marxismus als Spiegelbild seines Scheiterns’), Stephan Lessenich states that the 1976 volume ‘is paved by an obvious ambivalence’ or ambiguity.[11] According to the current director of the century-old Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt am Main, Anderson’s narrative ‘blames theory for its departure from practice’, thereby supporting ‘a systematically limited view of social reality’.[12] What Lessenich finds particularly troubling is that Anderson’s conception of emancipatory struggle was exclusively modelled on the male working class. The gap between theory and practice identified in Considerations on Western Marxism takes on a new significance, as the purportedly most progressive political and theoretical practices of the time – such as feminism and sociological theses on the legitimation crisis of late capitalism – were ostensibly overlooked.
I would like to further elaborate on the ambivalences or ambiguities mentioned. As numerous commentators have pointed out, Anderson’s distinctive Western Marxism poses several problems, primarily stemming from its conflation of two very distinct generations of continental European radical thinkers. Beyond Anderson’s occasionally imprecise criteria for defining who constituted a Western Marxist, it is clear that the lack of mediation in his formalist analysis led to prejudicial assessments of the authors and works under examination. More broadly, it can be argued that Anderson overstated the weight of the experience of defeat – Korsch, Lukács, and Gramsci began their careers during a period of revolutionary triumph and working-class ascendancy – and exaggerated the intellectual isolation and consequent disengagement from practice that supposedly led Western Marxist thinkers to depoliticise and, in many instances, defect to the bourgeois camp.
Another key criticism concerns Anderson’s idealised and unrealistic portrayal of the international Trotskyist scene, which ultimately led him to relinquish the hypothesis of the ‘reunification of theory and practice in a mass revolutionary movement’ in the early 1980s.[13] For the sake of argument, I will set this aside and focus exclusively on the issues directly related to the category of Western Marxism.
The main virtue of this category lies in its inherent comprehensiveness. Western Marxism idea is broad enough to encompass the major Twentieth-century Marxist philosophical contributions, according to Anderson. By means of a single, all-encompassing notion, it is possible to grasp the specificities of the production of Marxist theory at a given time and in a given place. As Gregory P. Williams suggests, this is because Anderson’s Olympian universalism ‘pursued totalities in an open-ended process […] called totalization’.[14] Drawing on Western Marxists like Lukács, Althusser, and particularly Jean-Paul Sartre, Anderson conceived a totality as ‘an entity whose structures are bound together in such a way that any one of them considered separately is an abstraction’.[15] Given its complexity and openness, a totality like Western Marxism comprises overlapping and contradictory impulses, requiring Anderson ‘to simultaneously describe general rules and exceptions to those rules’.[16]
However, this inherent comprehensiveness appears insufficient to critics who argue that Anderson omitted thinkers like Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, Wilhelm Reich, Raymond Williams, and Manuel Sacristán from his map, as well as experiences such as the journal Arguments, the Socialisme ou barbarie collective, the Stiuationist International, and Italian operaismo. The same applies to those who criticize Anderson for not adequately considering the contributions of Eastern figures like David Ryazanov, Isaak Rubin, Evegny Pashukanis, Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Voloshinov, Karel Kosík, and the Budapest School. Lastly, the criticism that Anderson’s framework excluded Marxist developments from Africa, Asia, and Latin America also challenged the purported openness of his category.
These criticisms suggest that the greatest weakness of the category is to be found where its greatest virtue lies. Therefore, at a certain point, the necessity of an enlarged camp for narrating the history of Western Marxism comes into question. Rich and productive as it may be, the exploration of alternative trajectories and the ensuing complexification of Western Marxism’s constellation or force field ultimately reproduces the contested openness. Even more expanded fields, such as those of the thousand Marxisms or of the new critical theories, would entail identical drawbacks. And the same goes for the temptation to adapt to the times and speak not of East or West, but of a Marxism as global as capital itself in its current neoliberal hyper-reactionary phase of accumulation.
I am not advocating transforming Western Marxism into a closed totality, such as Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system, for instance. I am merely highlighting the main virtue and weakness of Anderson’s category in order to advise Twenty-first-century intellectual historians to take the necessary precautions when examining and reflecting on the Twenty-century Marxist tradition.
Regarding the level of what is commonly referred to as practice, Marxism today may be both global and fragmentary, necessitating that the actually existing thousand Marxisms and remnants of classical Marxism move towards a new synthesis. Although psychoanalysis and Marxism itself have shown that proposing complete unity is ultimately idealistic, and that the project of fully integrating theory and practice is thus an impossible task, the encounter between all that has evolved from Western Marxism and what remains of classical Marxism is both urgent and necessary. Whether or not this encounter occurs, the very urgency and necessity of it in a time of global catastrophe signify that the history of Marxism in general, and Western Marxism in particular, remains ongoing and open-ended, with numerous battles to be waged and pages yet to be written.
Works cited and referenced
Anderson, Kevin B. 2022 [1995], Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study, Leiden: Brill.
Anderson, Perry 1979 [1976], Considerations on Western Marxism, London: Verso.
Anderson, Perry 1992, English Questions, London: Verso.
Jacoby, Russell 1991, ‘Western Marxism’ in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom Bottomore, Oxford: Blackwell.
Jay, Martin 1984, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Korsch, Karl 2008 [1923], Marxism and Philosophy, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Lessenich, Stephan 2023, ‘Perry Andersons Auseinandersetzung mit dem westlichen Marxismus als Spiegelbild seines Scheiterns – Nachwort zur Neuauflage’ in Über den westlichen Marxismus, by Perry Anderson, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Löwy, Michael 1982, ‘Marxisme occidental’ in Dictionnaire critique du marxisme, edited by Gérard Bensussan and Geoerges Labica, Paris: PUF.
Merquior, J.G. 1986, Western Marxism, London: Paladin Books.
Ponce de León, Jennifer and Gabriel Rockhill 2024, ‘Introduction: Socialism as Anticolonial Liberation: Contemporary Lessons from Losurdo’ in Western Marxism: How it Was Born, How it Died, How it Can Be Reborn, by Domenico Losurdo, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Timpanaro, Sebastiano 1975 [1970], On Materialism, London: New Left Books.
Williams, Gregory P. 2020, Contesting the Global Order: The Radical Political Economy of Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein, Albany NY: SUNY Press.
Notes
[1] Löwy 1982, p. 717.
[2] Jacoby 1991, p. 581.
[3] Korsch 2008, p. 134.
[4] Timpanaro 1975, p. 29.
[5] Anderson 1979, p. 42, n. 22.
[6] Jay 1984, p. 1.
[7] Merquior 1986, p. 1; Anderson 2022, p. 9.
[8] Ponce de León and Rockhill 2024, p. 13.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., p. 16.
[11] Lessenich 2023, p. 128.
[12] Ibid., pp. 131, 132.
[13] Anderson 1979, p. 101.
[14] Williams 2020, p. 9.
[15] Anderson 1992, p. 58, n. 12.
[16] Williams 2020, p. 86.
