Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, September 2020

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no credentials to opine on the history of Marxism, sociology, or even social network analysis.

Anna Lee Huber, An Artless Demise

Mind candy historical mystery, 7th in the series; continuing to be enjoyable.

Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism

A brisk survey of Marxist thought from continental western Europe*, 1918--1968, which proceeds from the premises that (1) real Marxist insight is directly translatable into, and derives from, joining the working class in revolutionary action, and (2a) Lenin fulfilled these conditions and accordingly made great advances in Marxist theory, as well as (2b) founding a genuinely proletarian state. As Anderson brings out, all the western Marxist theorists he surveys (except Gramsci) were children of the middle or even upper classes, and were philosophers disconnected from concrete questions of politics (except Gramsci) and economics. It is thus suggestive that a lot of what they did was combining classical Marxism with other philosophies or ideologies (psycho-analysis, existentialism, structuralism), in writings too obscure for most people with university educations, let alone contemporary workers. (Such syncretism of apparently-incompatible traditions, in increasingly arcane prose, is very common when communities literate intellectuals are left to their own, inward-looking devices [cf.].) Anderson trembles on the verge of a historical-materialist analysis of western Marxism as, in fact, an ideology of (a fraction of) the educated professional classes, but doesn't quite go there, perhaps because he thinks those works were intellectually valuable — and in any case Anderson spent a lot of his career importing this stuff into English-speaking, especially British, intellectual life.

A rather extraordinary concluding chapter points out that there was in fact another Marxist tradition in western Europe which did try to be revolutionary and keep its eye on politics and even economics, namely Trotskyism. Anderson ends by saying, or at least strongly hinting, that there needed to be some synthesis between the Trots and the philosophers.

An even more extraordinary afterword, from a decade later, walks back premise (1). The new argument is that historical materialism is supposed to be a science of history, and practical action in the present can't change the past, so correct Marxism can't be all about the unity of theory and practice. (The afterword does not re-examine premise (2b), about how Lenin founded a workers' state.) This shows commendable intellectual honesty and willingness to revisit ideas on Anderson's part, but does raise a lot of "Where else were you confidently wrong about?" questions.

Still, if you are willing to accept, or mentally divide through for, premises (1) and (2), this is a really good high-level survey of half a century of left-wing thought, from a very learned and intelligent commentator. The best alternative I can think of is volume III of Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism, but this is vastly shorter, if more schematic. (I would pay a lot to read Anderson and Kolakowski seriously reviewing each other.)

*: Anderson mentions British Marxist historians, but doesn't discuss their work; no other Marxist historians get referred to. As for Marxist economists, he mentions Sweezy in the USA and Sraffa in the UK, but mostly to say that they marked end-points for the tradition of distinctively Marxist economics, Sweezy by hybridizing it with Keynes, Sraffa by, well, whatever the hell it was Sraffa was up to. (That last is a jest but I'm actually curious about Anderson's thoughts on Sraffa.)

Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend

The legend is that Marx thought there was no such thing as a trans-historical, universal human nature, that he dissolved into the "ensemble of social relations" which are so malleable that the idea is meaningless. Geras is very, very patient in picking apart all of the textual evidence offered on behalf of this, and countering it with all of the places where Marx plainly does rely on the idea of an un-changin