| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Perry Anderson Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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In one of your essays, I think it was in a series of lectures you gave at Irvine on the tracks of historical materialism, you're talking about Marxist theory, and you say, "The trajectory of the theory has thus always been primarily determined by the fate of that practice. Any report on the Marxism of the past decade" -- I think you're talking about the seventies here -- "will inevitably then be the first instance of political history of its external environment." You go on to say that Marxism should always be self-critical, and that learning from what is happening in the world should inform the theory. Let's bring that perspective to the world today. One of the things that's quite apparent is the decline of the left. You wrote an introduction for a collection of essays on the fate of the left in the nineties. What happened there? Why has there been this decline?
Well, it's a very large subject. [There were] different strands of what very loosely speaking could be called the left. There was the attempt by the communist tradition, let's call it that, which is the revolutionary tradition attempting to overthrow capitalist states by, if necessary, armed struggle -- not absolutely necessary, but normally, and that was the conception. Then there was the much more moderate social democratic tradition of gradual reform in the richer countries. The communist movement was strong in the poorer European countries and in Asia; the reform social democratic tradition was strong in the richer countries. And then you had, also associated with the left, the anti-colonial movements, which were not either social democratic or communist very often, but they could see themselves movements of popular national liberation, and some were extremely hostile to the existing order of world capital.
So your question is about what happened to these three. It's a differentiated picture, I suppose you would have to say. But the simple answer, if you want a really simple answer, is this: all of these traditions greatly underestimated the internal strength of capitalism as a socioeconomic system. Its capacity for self-adaptation, for continual adjustment; the extraordinary resources of productivity which spring from its reliance on competition as an essential mechanism of economic life -- these were greatly underestimated, I believe, in all of those traditions. If you wanted to have one single reason, treating it very, very simply now, as to why the left today is much weaker than it was fifty years ago, I would say that it underestimated its adversary.
You wrote recently in your inaugural essay when you returned to the editorship of the New Left Review: "Whatever limitations persist to its practice, neoliberalism is a set of principal rules undivided across the globe, the most successful ideology in world history. Virtually the entire horizon of reference in which the generation of the sixties grew up has been wiped away, the landmarks of reformist and revolutionary socialism in equal measure."
Yes, and many people have said, "Well, that's going too far." And there may be an element of exaggeration, perhaps, possibly, in the last remark. As far as the first remark is concerned, this is the thing I often encountered some very strong objections to. "Neoliberalism is much more partial as a doctrine, it's not really so successful. And so why should you say that?" But actually, I think it is, it has a universality as a core doctrine -- a doctrine of the pure free market and its virtue -- that really does go beyond even the traditional world religions. There were never really world religions; they were actually regional religions, all of them, without exception. They were never really global, in that sense. You can find neoliberalism today, in their hard neoliberal doctrines, in official and governing positions in virtually every corner of the planet. You could go to Beijing, and you will find some people swearing by Frederick Hayek or Milton Friedman. Or just as freely, in Buenos Aires or in, shall we say, Frankfurt, or in San Francisco, or Chicago.
In A Zone of Engagement in your concluding essay, where you're reviewing Fukuyama's work, you offer a look into possible future contradictions in the system. 
And at one point, you say, "The sources of socialism as it was traditionally conceived have not so simply dried up." And then you go on to say, "So the central case against capitalism today is the combination of ecological crisis and social polarization. It is the greed." Explain what you meant by that.
Social polarization: if you look at any of the regular UN reports, you see that wealth today is more concentrated, and more staggeringly concentrated on a planetary scale. The top twenty richest individuals now in the world have at their disposal resources that are far larger than a good many states. It's a staggering concentration of wealth at the top of the global ladder. At the bottom, you have an incredible pit of famine and misery in very large areas of the world. This has not substantially improved at all over the past twenty, thirty years. Africa, of course, is the most catastrophic region in this latter respect, but it's also a case if you look in large parts of India as well as Latin America. Social polarization is something that many liberals or conservatives will concede, and say this is regrettable and so on, but it still exists.
As for ecological disaster, it's very, very clear, this is basically now common sense, that global warming is still proceeding. You only have to ask yourself, "What would happen if the entire population of India and China had two-car garages and were living at the technological and the economic standard that the American middle class is today?" The planet would become very rapidly uninhabitable.
One of the concerns in your Elberg Lecture is that internationalism, which we've talked about as being a guiding theme in the way you've looked at problems, is now the perspective of international capitalism. Whereas the opposition, the protests, tend not to have the same capacity to think and act globally.
For the century between, shall we say, the 1840s and the 1940s, the capacity to transcend one's own national limitations and national interests for a much wider set of interests, and to translate this transcendence into actually organized actions, belonged on the whole to the labor movement and to the left. The capacity didn't belong to businessmen, capitalists, and so on. Since the 1950s, that has very dramatically changed. We have seen in the postwar order a higher degree of coordination, the ability to make a more than national viewpoint on the interests of the system, for the interest of the system, on the part of the privileged. Whereas, those who are less privileged are more and more confined to a local region and at best a national framework of action, and that's partly to do with the destruction in some of the traditions of the Communist International, and the withering away of many of the traditions of the alternative Socialist International as well.
You write in A Zone of Engagement: "The distances between a Korean seamstress, Zambian field hand, Lebanese bank clerk, Filipino sailor, Italian secretary, Russian miner, Japanese autoworker, are vastly greater than those that were once bridged in the ranks of the unitary Second International, even though not a few might even be the employees of the same conglomerate."
Yes. I think the original labor movements derived their strength partly from the fact that they were white male working classes, which concentrated in a few kinds of fundamental industries: engineering, mines, and so forth. Today, of course, capitalism is an infinitely larger, more ramified system on a world scale. It has many greater types of employment. Its geographical span, as you mentioned, is vaster. So you have a huge dispersal in effect of those who work for capital, while capitalism itself grabs more and more means of coordination of its activities on a world scale.
So where might we look to find some sort of oppositional strength to these forces of capitalism?
We already see the beginnings of a very strong potential popular reaction in the anti-globalization movement. It's not a very happy term, the anti-globalization movement, as such. The word globalization itself is a bit of a euphemism. But it's clear that the actions in Seattle, in Prague, in Quebec mark the probable beginnings of something like an attempt, a very conscious attempt by young people, by trade unionists and so on, by concerned citizens in many parts of the world, to come together to try and designate a step on the uncontrolled operations of capitalism.
Do we have a set of theories on the left yet that address these sets of problems, that define a map in a way, that some conservative thinkers are beginning to do or have done?
Let's take the anti-globalization movement. You do have attempts to theorize this now. My own view is that they may be a bit premature because the movement is only, as it were, scarcely more than a year or a couple years old. It's very unlikely that anyone would come up with a very satisfactory conceptual framework for a movement whose future we can't yet fully discern, I would say. It's very understandable when people would want to try to generate a big theory out of that, but it may be a little bit early.
On the other hand, in terms of the intellectual resources of the left, I have often said and would repeat: there's plenty in the locker. The single most widely read work in the world about the history of the twentieth century is Eric Hobsbawm's work, The Age of Extremes, translated into more than twenty languages. This is a work of a Marxist historian, very openly reflecting on the history of the twentieth century. If we want what is the most serious attempt to understand what's happened in the world's economy from 1945 to the present, you don't turn to economists, who don't think very historically, you turn to a Marxist historian, like my colleague Robert Brenner at UCLA, whose work is the fundamental contribution to understanding, to unpacking some very complicated history of what's happened from '45 to the present. 
If you want to understand the cultural tone and tempo of the times and also a great deal of what we could say is the lived experience, at least in the once-capitalist countries of the period from the mid-seventies to the present, readers, not just on the left, will turn to Frederick Jamieson, whose work on postmodernity and the postmodern is the central body of work on this field. If you want to turn to questions of ecology and environmental disaster, these questions, it's the work of, again, people from the Marxist tradition, like Mike Davis. His recent book, The Late Victorian Holocausts, is a masterpiece, showing the interrelations between natural history and social history.
One has a very rich repertoire, if you like, in intellectual resources on the left. The decline of the left is, curiously, political organizational decline. Intellectually, the left is still quite vibrant.
With these intellectual resources in hand, can we look at any of the phenomena in the world today as a source of effective political action in the future? You talked about the anti-globalization movement. What about the women's movement?
This is very interesting. If one had to say, "From the point of view of anyone on the left, what are the best things that have happened in the world, the good things that have happened in the last twenty, thirty years?" It's certainly the women's movement-- often a slightly misleading term; you can speak of women's emancipation, women's liberation, I prefer that term. Because very often the kinds of liberation and emancipation brought about have been molecular; they're not necessarily the result of an organized movement, in the sense like a labor movement which operates as an organization, with institutions and continuity. The women's movement is a much larger cultural and social sea change, and it's an enormous change. Obviously, it's a great, great step forward for equality, and historically, it's such an obvious point.
Now, having said that, it's not clear at all (and this is a matter which, I think, many people are uncertain about), how far the equalization relation between the sexes has consequences for the social and economic structures. How far can capitalism simply quite happily live with that, without really changing its way in many other respects?
You can have equality of the sexes and great social inequality as well, as we have. Social inequality has not declined at all in the United States in the last twenty-five years. Since the late Carter days, inequality has increased in the United States very steadily, even under President Clinton, actually. If you look at the real indices of disposable wealth, you will see that inequality has actually increased, even as in the period of the Republican presidencies in the eighties. So social inequality has greatly increased, but at the same time, gender equality has also increased. This is a kind of conundrum, which I don't know that anybody really expected. Conservatives said you're going to level all social difference if you allow equality between the sexes. People on the left thought, "Well, if you have sexual equality, that must generate greater degrees social equality, and lessen social inequality." But so far -- the evidence isn't all in -- but so far it looks as if these two things can coexist: greater sexual equality and greater social inequality.
What about the potential of the ecological movement as a source of revolutionary potential?
I would say that so far we may be in a trough at the minute. The initial impetus of the ecological movement was extremely radical and had a revolutionary potential for changing the coordinates of the society. Then, typically, in the nineties above all, the Green Movement became more and more institutionalized, to some extent co-opted into the existing structure, particularly evident in Europe. The Green Parties, when they finally entered government, behaved not very differently from rather traditional, very unexciting, standard, non-Green parties. On the other hand, this has bred a lot of discontent among younger activists, and therefore I think that the potential for a radical ecological movement remains very, very big. It's also simply the case that the danger is getting worse and worse. It would be crazy to discount or minimize the emancipating potential of ecological activism.
What should we make of the relationship of globalization to U.S. power in the world? Is globalization merely a manifestation of U.S. power?
Adorno and Horkheimer once wrote this famous phrase: "He who does not wish to speak of capitalism should be silent about anti-Semitism." I believe that's actually a false proposition in some ways. It's too drastic. Plenty of anti-Semitism has nothing to do with capitalists. But I think you can say that he who does not want to speak about America should be silent about globalization. The two things are very, very closely interlinked, very closely interlinked.
What is in the global culture that is not American culture is a very legitimate question. It's not clear what is the answer to that. All the global institutions which have been set up in the bubble in the eighties and nineties are ones which are essentially at American behest. We can see this if you look at the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of International Settlements, the UN Security Council, all of these; we see again and again that the United States is able more or less unilaterally to compel these international institutions to do what is, in effect, a national will. It's not a dictate directly, because actually most other governments freely cooperate, and sort of wish to cooperate. But this is undoubtedly an American order, it's pax Americana, of the kind that even the most ambitious of the generation of Dean Acheson never really imagined.
One of the points you make in your most recent long essay in the New Left Review was a commitment to look at the major changes in culture. You suggested that many of them emanate from the United States. You speak of the massive displacement of dominance from verbal to visual code. You talk about the way the market absorbs deviance in a youth culture. And finally, "... the voltage connecting high and low systems has been shortened." Talk a little about the contours of that and its power to contribute to the success of both capitalism and American power.
It's connected to something that I talk about elsewhere, which is what I would call the "plebianization" of the culture. Traditionally, Western cultures had in the early parts of the twentieth century, right through until, I would say, around the turn of the sixties to the seventies, two very distinct levels. There was high culture, which was the preserve of privileged elites, the highly educated elites. And then there was a definitely second-rate commercial mass culture for ordinary people, who didn't have the same privileges. That was, roughly speaking, the split-level structure. It had two aspects. On the one hand, the high culture remained pretty uncontaminated, as it were, by the commercial imperatives of the market. On the other hand, it meant that the commercial culture often had to appeal to very large numbers of people. So you had a naïve freshness to it, which you can see if you look at Hollywood movies in the interwar period, right up through the forties. They're not knowing in some ways. And so there's a sense of tapping into very strong, spontaneous, primal dreams and aspirations and hopes, fantasies of ordinary people.
I think that that division has broken down very, very greatly in the last twenty years. What you get is a kind of intermingling of the two, most of whose short-running effects are pretty negative on the whole, so that the mass culture is far more knowing today than it was before. It's kind of a second order. Much more directly manipulative, I think, and it borrows elements, to some extent, from the high culture. And the high culture has also been dragged relentlessly into the vortex of the markets through a whole series of essentially commercial rewards and inducements and pressures. You can see this right through the structure of publishing, and the structure of the film industry, the structure of the music industry, all of this. What you now have is a system that is leveled, in which, in a certain sense, there isn't any longer the hierarchy; the hierarchy has eroded. So you can say it's more egalitarian. I think it genuinely is much more egalitarian, but it's, in some ways, a vitiated egalitarianism in which quantity is winning out over quality on a very big scale.
And a real cost to innovation, to bringing forth new thinking.
Very much so.
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