79 | Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism

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[Out of context drop]

Owen: But I know, I know but there is a connection, I—I will figure it out one day, between speculative metaphysics and communism. I do believe they're organically linked. One day I will, I will understand it.

[Laughter]

William: I'm rooting for you, man!

Gil: Yeah, good luck, brother.

[Theme music / Episode start]

0:41 | Lillian: Hello! This is What's Left of Philosophy. I'm Lillian, and here with me today is Gil, Owen, and Will. Hey guys.

[All say hello.]

0:51 | Lillian: For this episode we decided to read a little classic by Perry Anderson titled Considerations on Western Marxism from 1976. Francis Roy Peregrine Perry Anderson is a Marxist historian. He survives his almost as well-known historian brother Benedict Anderson, who wrote Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism in 1983. Other notable works include Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Lineages of the Absolute State, Arguments with English Marxism and In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, the last of which further develops the themes that began in Considerations. And he has a bunch of other books too.

Anderson was the editor of the New Left Review for 20 years. I think he still does that. He played a role in the process of the New Left beginning to take stock of its legacy, some of which we will discuss today, and he continues to influence the New Left Review as well as Right for the London Review of Books. Some people consider it a right of passage to have been excoriated by Anderson in their pages called the Perry Anderson Treatment, if they are to be taken seriously by the effete echelons of the academic left and I think not all survive this treatment.

[Laughter]

2:13 | William: I dream of this happening to me.

2:15 | Lillian: Considerations on Western Marxism is, in my opinion, or at least the sense I had about it, was that it was strange to read in 2023 because it was a little bit hard to believe that it's 50 years old. It introduces debates about the intellectual legacy of Western Marxism that were hardly passed and that, I think, speaking frankly, I don't think we've much resolved. The basic idea is that the themes, preoccupations, and intellectual impulses of Western Marxism emerged after what Anderson calls the classical period of Marxism, which was primarily eastern in its orientation. And I kind of want to emphasize that because I think when we think about Western Marxism, people tend to think the Russian tradition and the Russian Revolution in the Eastern Bloc and Poland or even East Prussia, that that was the West, and I think that that is a sort of artificial construction that is only in keeping with the more recent trend of thinking about Europe as a whole as the West. But for most of Europe's history, and at least during its early industrial development, that was simply not true and there was this really rather strong difference between the East and West, this development and culture, and so on and so forth. So one of the things he points out is that actually the political tradition, the classical classical tradition of Marxism was really an Eastern phenomenon. That was where it flourished and not in the West, where we tend to think about it now, in Italy, France and Germany.

And, most importantly, the big cultural and political difference was that when the Marxist tradition wasn't to be found in the university and it was instead in cadre schools, party schools and political debates that prompted urgent theorizing about economic development, social structure, the state, internationalism, imperialism and class struggle. He argues that the main figures of Western Marxism, like (sort of) Lukaçs, Sartre, Althusser, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and the rest of the cast that you probably know, were people whose ideas were shaped in defeat and who had little to no knowledge of the classical tradition and who were all (with Gramsci as the only exception, an awkward bridge between generations) chairs of philosophy at a university. Provocatively, Anderson writes that the progressive relinquishment of economic and political structures as the central concerns of theory was accompanied by a basic shift in the whole center of gravity of European Marxism toward and then in italics philosophy. And he means that literally.

4:53 | Gil: Derogatory.

[Laughter]

4:54 | Lillian: The tradition became obsessed with method, pre-marxian philosophical influences, and the early works of Marx that were more philosophical in nature but that Marx himself never published as works of philosophy. They were therefore relating more to the bourgeois thought in social science at the time, and probably still continue to do so through the 80s and 90s and early aughts insofar as Marxism survived at all in the academy, more so than they were relating to socialist thought and social science, since bourgeois thought was still dynamic in the post-war period and socialist thought was increasingly not. Anderson also points out that the national intellectual traditions in Italy, Germany, and France became increasingly provincial and unaware of one another.

This essay is somewhat ethnographic rather than analytical, but I think it's really useful for analytical reasons. There's something so obviously true about the thematic shifts that follow the formal shifts and who is doing theory and why. In a way it's a kind of ideological critique of professional intellectuals and professorial socialists who the likes of Kautsky, Lenin, Luxembourg, Trotsky and Bukharin would have scorned, even if some of them likewise came from the middle class.

But it forces us to ask, or at least it forced me to ask what if some of the philosophical problems that plague myself and my peers are just that: philosophical problems for philosopher? For instance, the classical tradition had no problem having international debates about development and imperialism in war. Now we debate whether Marxism is simply a Western paradigm or implicitly nationalist in orientation. Why would that be? Classical Marxists were obsessed by the bourgeois state, but now we accuse Marxism of economic reductionism and a constitutive failure to think politically. So my question, I guess, is whose problems are these really? And, if we can be a little self-indulgent, what does that say about what's left of philosophy?

[Laughter]

7:00 | Gil: That’s the name of the show!

[Laughter]

7:03 | William: I've heard of that place before! Okay, I'll start on a more personal note, like, reading this. One, Owen kind of expressesd this so it isn't only me, but oof! starting to feel called out.

[Laughter]

7:17 | Gil: Yeah! My God!

[Laughter]

7:20 | William: Well, I love myself a little philosophy. And when, oh man, when he talked about, you know, the shift to the focus on method, I was like: Oh no, that's what I really like!

[Laughter]

7:29 | Owen: And then he like names off like five of my favorite books and it's like, look at this, like all these method-obsessed people!

[Laughter]

7:37 | Lillian: We're getting the Anderson treatment right now!

7:45 | William: From decades ago, he's reading us for filth. Well, I guess a cool place to start is this idea that he's working through of one's connection to political organization or the sort of outside-the-academy disciplining of Marxism affects the themes. And I thought that was really interesting and rich, where he's describing this cadre of figures that he's describing, and Lillian already said their names so I won't repeat them like Althusser, Sartre, and all of that, found themselves faced with the choice of either becoming a part of a disciplined organization which, because organizations are this way, would constrain the sort of philosophical creativity and experimentation they were trying to introduce into Marxism, or, you know, resign themselves to isolation and thus, you know, maybe increase the philosophical creativity at the cost of actually, you know, analyzing, you know empirical social relations. And so I guess you know, I'm wondering what you all think about that.

At least one premise of Anderson's argument seems to be not just your location but who you're in conversation with will affect the type, the content of the Marxism that you get and, you know, where it's directed. I find that plausible, but I was wondering what you all made of this choice between disciplinary organization outside the academy or isolation. And near the end of the book, he starts talking about how a theme of this type of Marxist thought is pessimism. You know, the experience of defeat and isolation.

9:22 | Gil: Yeah, I also felt pretty singled out or called out. The shift to method, the shift to cultural analysis and criticism, away from hard economic reality—

9:33 | Owen: Or from socialism.

9:35 | Gil: —Or from socialism. I mean, there's a way in which the story that he tells just has like immediate plausibility to me when I, when, you know, he gives this sort of account of what did it look like in the post war period for this series of Western Marxist thinkers. And yeah, you had, on the one hand, you could not completely sever the tie between theory and practice by joining one or more of the Communist parties or Social Democratic parties that existed at the time. But those were being forced due to like orthodoxy to, you know, basically toe a Stalinist party line. So that you know the organic unity of that theory-practice connection was already actually severed too. It made it impossible to do any actual clear eyed political thinking. Or you needed to like couch your analyses in ways that wouldn't be offensive.

Or, just to just be in isolation from that like explicitly right, like you know in more and more and less like obvious ways. I mean, by the time we get to, like, an Adorno—Adorno for me is like the apex of this. Like with Adorno, first of all, I never—what does he ever say about politics ever? What does he ever say about economics ever? You read something like Negative Dialectics and it's like, I guess he's talking about exchange society, but like what the fuck is that? You know, what are we talking about? Does it have any actual relationship specifically to capitalism? And like yeah, it's, it kind of hits hard when—

11:00 | Will: It’s certainly highly mediated.

[Laughter]

11:02 | Gil: It's certainly highly mediated! It's highly mediated and it hits pretty hard when, when Anderson's like: yeah, and of course they're all professors of philosophy. It's like right, right.

11:11 | Lillian: I mean that was kind of shocking. It's like they were all, without exception, professors of philosophy. And then you're like, oh! Oh!

11:17 | Gil: Chairs, yeah! Oh! whoops! Uh-oh!

[Laughter]

11:20 | Owen: And that's part of why they went from having like a direct organic connection with like workers movements to speaking what he calls ‘an enciphered language’, which is what happened.

11:30 | Gil: Quote: “at an increasingly remote distance from the class whose fortunes it formally sought to serve or articulate.”

11:37 | Owen: That’s right.

11:40 | William: Though I will say, you know, and he does acknowledge this, that Sartre is also kind of weird example. Because if I remember, Sartre, yes, he's trained in philosophy, but he didn't end up teaching philosophy. He became, you know, that engaged writer and public intellectual and all of that. Sartre is a weird example because, yes, on the one hand, when you read, if you read, Being and Nothingness, jargon all over the place—no, fine, Critique of Dialectical Reason, absolutely yes, jargon and all of that. But you know, Sartre also explicitly tried to think through well, how does one remain engaged with you on the ground, struggles and all that. And I think, the most classical examples, you know his activism around the Algerian war, France's war in Algeria.

12:27 | Owen: He was also a master of mobilizing different mediums and formats for writing. So one of the things that makes him, I think, super unique as a philosopher is that he was an incredibly good journalist in terms of writing journalistic style articles about the Algerian war, for example, that became like really influential, and then pamphlets and plays and novels and just like a massive array of media. But he's singular in that sense.

12:53 | Lillian: Yeah. One thing that I kept returning to was—There's two things. First, it was striking to me how Anderson describes, for example, Sartre as having not a lot of familiarity with the Marxist tradition, and I find this is true a lot. Like, I hope, I hope no one feels called out who listens to this too much, I'm just like making an observation. The lack of familiarity with the practical tradition of Marxism that I have experienced intellectually, in academia and in philosophy is very, very acute. So, you know, there's some people who are like, really classical Marxism heads and they've read everything, and I'm not one of those people, but I've read a great deal of the classical tradition and I found myself thinking: at what point do people think that they learned this stuff?

Because Marxism kind of haunts philosophy and the social sciences in this way that I now find even more perplexing than I did before. Because I used to think that it was like—I'm trying to find the words to say this—people like kind of read second-hand about Marx, or their professors, who kind of like used to be radical, and so they kind of use it as a foil for themselves throughout their whole life, but kind of always in this like disavowing way. Now I'm realizing that the ignorance actually might be more profound than that. Like, if Sartre didn't really know much about it, then why would I expect any of the teachers I ever had to know much about it? And so there's this way in which the specter of Marxism that haunts both social philosophy and social science becomes increasingly peculiar if that's true. I used to think it was bad faith, let me put it that way, or posturing graduate students. But if it's actual ignorance in many places, then I feel like there's a whole sociological world that I don't quite understand.

And then the second thing that really stood out to me is when he says that what happened here was the reduction of space for theoretical work to the constricted alternatives of institutional obedience or individual isolation, crippling any possibility of a dynamic relationship between historical materialism and socialist struggle, and which precluded any direct development of the main themes of classical Marxism. I don't know what I want to say about that. But the perception is that Marxism is the thing that's narrow. I'm obsessed with this—you guys know this, or our audience knows this—Marxism is what's narrow. Anderson is saying that it is the inverse: that what happened to it in the academy is what's narrow. I think that's crazy. I’m very struck by this whole thing.

15:50 | Gil: One thing to say about that is that—I think you're right that he's saying that it's Western Marxism that's narrow, and this is for a couple of reasons. I mean, I also want to say that there are moments in this text, and we'll hopefully get to them, where I want to push back a little bit and be like OK, it's not all trash. And he even admits himself in the Afterword, he's like this is very polemical, I'm painting in a brush. And also he, by the way, says in the Afterword: don't think that what I'm advocating for is a kind of just uncritical, activist philosophical orientation, that that would just solve the problem; these guys were just sitting in the ivory tower, if only they had actually been sitting in in a strike or something. That's too quick of a conclusion to draw.

But one thing that I think is true is that: ‘what is the object of Marxism?’ is maybe a good question to ask here. And it seems like in the classical tradition, in the classical Marxists—your Korsch, Luxembourg, sometimes Gramsci, certainly Engels and Hilferding and all this—it’s capitalism. It is the critique of political economy, it is these questions of political and social relations, the state, imperialism, et cetera, and in a lot of what we now think of as Marxism, and it's a Western or academicized version, the object of Marxism is—Marxism!

7:10 | Owen: Marxism, yeah.

7:11 | Gil: It’s Marx! It's just this sort of endless discursive meditation on and reflection on—the text.

17:17 | William: Just one more reading of Marx.

17:19 | Gil: Just one more reading of Marx, exactly.

17:20 | Owen: Because that's what stands in the way of us, and a better future is just one more really good reading of Marx.

17:28 | William: We're so close to cracking the labor theory of value, oh my God.

17:33 | Gil: And it's one of those questions that I think Marxist or leftist thinkers always need to ask themselves, is, like, what is the point of this work that I'm doing right now? Because if the point is to get quote ‘Marx’ ‘right’ because, good news, now we have greater access to the archives and I can test this against the new leaflet of a chapter from the Grundrisse and I'll know that I got Marx right—that kind of doesn't fucking matter. The question is does it describe the world correctly? Do we ever get past this kind of hermeneutic echo chamber to talk about the real political shit that's actually meant to be the motivating stakes?

18:12 | Owen: Does it get the world right, or does it also like potentiate political practice in new ways or frame it in new ways that might have traction outside of Marxist theory? That's the other thing, right: There's the explanatory part and then there's the practical side. Both were intimately connected in that generation of Marxists, with Luxembourg and Lukacs and Gramsci.

18:33 | William: I actually am feeling kind of the polemical spirit as well, like what you just said there, Gil and Owen, I don't know, for some reason that just felt really clarifying for me. So on the one hand you even have what Lillian just says, that you know it actually might turn out that a lot of these generations of philosophers don't even understand or read much Marx. So there's, it's not even the object is to get Marx right. They're using a very caricatured notion of Marx that is used there as a way of saying: forget about that capitalism stuff, or at least forget about how we think Marx talked about capitalism, junk that whole enterprise and all of that.

But I also am warm to the idea that you know, maybe something that’s peculiar to the dynamics of philosophy, and maybe Marx did kind of have our number on this, is that it is in many ways an interpretive enterprise. So the, the object is often either specific arguments that are written down or specific figures, and so the idea that the point of Marxism is to simply repeat and say what Marx said over and over again: that does miss it. Now you might think getting what Marx said correct allows you to do the thing of explaining political economy, capitalist dynamics, et cetera. But you know, when Gil was talking, the polemical thing I was thinking is, I do sometimes worry about a type of analysis that offers itself as radical, but it's actually a form of what I would call, polemically again, Marxist conservatism, where all the arguments bottom out in: well, as Marx said, or Marx never said that, or Marx didn't agree.

[Laughter]

Which is not to say that Marx isn't smarter than me, I get it. But if the point is to understand and change the world and the point is not to understand and develop one more reading of Marx in order to sling against your opponents, I mean that will make a difference. And so we could say that maybe there's a tendency in philosophy of, well, of continuing to withdraw from the what Owen called the explanatory and the practical, to an overemphasis on the hermeneutical and the interpretive.

20:44 | Owen: The epistemological.

20:45 | William: Naming your reading of Marx. The New Marx Reading, the Althusserian Marxism, the Hegelian—I could go on and on and on, and it seems like something is missing there. And it's not to say that there hasn't been fruitful research, but it strikes me—Basically, what I wanted to say is that if we knew that we could change the world in the proper direction. And that would require doing things that go outside of things explicitly that Marx said, we should be about that, I imagine. You know, Marx isn't the limit, and he isn't the point of the political project. He is a historical figure who got something that a lot of us think he got right, and that's why we're interested in what he said, not simply because he's Karl Marx.

21:27 | Gil: I will say, in partial defense of the bad turn in the academicism and the epistemology emphasis, I get why, I get why so many of these thinkers wound up doing, like—here’s a line from the chapter on formal shifts. He says that the result is a remarkable amount of the output of Western Marxism became a prolonged and intricate discourse on method. Right, it's a discourse on method. And I want to just like apologetically say in these thinkers defense that like I get why you'd want to like try to do a discourse on Marxian method: because Marx was able to do something really remarkable, and really different than everything that came before.

Right, Like you know, sometimes there's this like really simple, simplistic way of being like, oh well, Marx just synthesized what—French politics, uh, German philosophy, and—

22:18 | Owen and William: British political economy.

21:20 | Gil: —and British political economy. And it's like, I mean, first of all, it's not really obvious or clear what it would look like just to like synthesize those straightforwardly, and, like, you can't just add those up and get Marx or capital. You don't just get that.

21:32 | Owen: It is a great mix, though, I gotta say.

[Laughter]

22:34 | Gil: It's a pretty banger mix, there's a lot going on there, lots to say for it! But he did do something different. And I get looking around and being like, okay, the conjuncture has changed, things are not the way that they were when in the 1850s Marx is doing his analysis of capitalism and his critique of political economy. I want to know how to do what Marx did today. And it makes certain kind of sense to be like okay, let's figure out what his methodological approach was, to try to figure out what it would look like to redeploy it today. Now, like, I think Anderson's right that there's a certain point at which the discourse on method becomes interminable and, you know, you never actually get to that next step of like doing conjunctural analysis—

23:13 | William: Actually doing it.

23:14 | Gil: —but I wanted to just say I get the temptation there.

23:17 | Owen: Yeah. Just as a bit of context, I like that he describes the way that we got to this place where every great Marxist text becomes a discourse on method is, it's the reverse trajectory of Marx's own—

[Laughter]

—life trajectory, where Marx went from philosophy and method, right, to politics, to economics, and we went—we did the exact opposite. We went from a Marxism that it's embedded in theories of economics and politics, and we ended up at philosophy and we're sticking around there.

23:46 | William: What I find really bracing in Anderson's reading is, one, there is the polemics, but I also sense that the way to read the text isn't to say like he's blaming Althusser or Sartre or anything like that. I think he's also trying to detail the historical conditions that made it possible for this rift to emerge, and those conditions were defeat and fragmentation and a lack of engagement with other traditions. Like it's fascinating. I love the part where he's just like you know it turns out, actually, you know, Althusser didn't really know much about what Sartre was writing. Sartre didn’t really know much about what he was writing.

[Laughter]

24:26 | William: And yet they're all lobbing bombs at each other. And so, I also think that there's a way that he sets up that opposition of, submit to the discipline, the sort of the Stalin dictates from the USSR, or isolation—but going into the university, that's surely another form of submitting to a type of discipline, and I think this might be a chance to talk about the kind of disciplinary constraints that philosophy places on thought. I mean, I do wonder, since our podcast is called What's Left of Philosophy, will there be a role left for philosophy? Like so we're getting the regressive elements, or at least the distorting elements, in particular historical conditions, of how philosophy increasingly lost the object that Marx or Marxist thought was winning, which is, you know, the political and the economic. But, you know, does this mean simply break with philosophy? Where does this leave, you know, the role of philosophy, given the constraints of the academy?

25:28 | Lillian: You know, I think it's really helpful for you to say that it's submitting to another kind of discipline because, and for that reason, it's sort of fecund in, I think what Anderson wants to say is a narrow way, because he says that the other kind of discipline, like of the, like the Soviet intellectual climate he doesn't find particularly fecund. But it's clear that that's also a kind of discipline. So I think what he wants to say is like, it depends on who your interlocutors are and if there's a problem here, it's not being aware that that's happening to you. So, like, you know, there's these debates that people online have and in publications about the professional middle class and so on. People get really, from my perception, people get really aggravated if you tell them they're part of the PMC and they have interests or like intellectual stakes in arguments that are basically germane to that milieu.

26:24 | Owen: I have experience with this.

26:25 | Lillian: I'm not sympathetic to that at all. I'm very OK with the PMC being a kind of, like, making a problem out of it, because I am middle class. I'm a professor. I don't understand the point in saying that I'm not. I hardly ever talk to working class people.

[Laughter]

26:40 | Lillian: The last time like I was in regular conversation with working class people was probably, you know, when I worked a regular job in New York or Chicago, or my family, you know, who are all retired, or even when I go to the pub.

But it's like, class segregation is so severe and people seem so threatened by pointing that out. I genuinely don't understand this. I think that if you care about politics or you think working class people are part of your constituency, then that kind of self-awareness is just not—it’s just not a threat. It's a problem to be understood. But my sense is that people really react very viciously against this, and I have a little bit of contempt for that at this point, because if you don't see the vast separation between most professors' lives and most people's lives, I just don't know what you're talking about. Like it means I just don't trust your what you're doing, to be honest.

[Laughter]

27:35 | Lillian: So that's one thing, and maybe part of why this hits home is that it forces you to stop play acting and larping, like: You live lives that are more analogous to even the ones Sartre or Althusser lived in, like Sartre was living a political life that we don't live.

27:50 | William: His apartment was firebombed over the French Algerian war. My apartment isn't.

27:54 | Lillian: Yeah, you know what I mean. So there's a, there's a sense, there's a way in which philosophers can inhabit mental worlds that are not theirs, and that's a part of the beauty of it. I mean, that's what I find like genuinely inspiring, but there's also a gross potential for self-delusion in this process, and I think this kind of text helps, helps me think about that problem.

28:22 | Owen: Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think it's worth pointing out that this exercise of, like, trying to understand one's class position, where one's embedded, how it informs one philosophically, and the actual connection between audiences that you might want to reach, or places that you want your ideas to go, and where they're actually going to go and what they're doing—that's something that is not, I think it's important to note that that's not something that is like a side political or moral concern of philosophy. I mean, it's a question that it's not a, it's not a tangential question for philosophy. I think that's really, really clear in this book.

What really comes through is that, just at a broader level, not even just about Marxism, but about philosophy in general, is that it has to answer to these kinds of pressures. It has to, as best it can, become aware of those pressures as well and work through them, in order to do philosophy well and meaningfully. You know what I mean. Because there's a lot of people that—there’s, I can't remember this guy's name. There's some guy who wrote this paper and it's been, I don't know, circulating a little bit online, about how philosophers shouldn't say anything about, shouldn't say anything about politics, basically, or shouldn't care about politics, and that it actually corrupts doing philosophy to engage with that.

There's a lot of people, and I don't want to be too prejudiced here, but it's probably like the vast majority of the analytic tradition and, you know, still probably most of the continental tradition, that think that somehow it's some side concern that isn't directly related to philosophy and that's just not true of, like the great historical philosophers. You think Hegel didn't have like tons of shit to say about Germany at his time and understand the way that the work he was doing was embedded within like contemporary historical developments? It's the same thing with Plato, it's the same thing with Spinoza, who was excommunicated on political grounds, and all these like philosophical greats that we like to hold up and say, they weren't—but they were all deeply political. Marx was the first to come along and understand exactly the, the determinative relationship between those practical concerns and theoretical work.

30:27 | William: Two weird things. I'll say the first weird thing. What Lillian was saying about, you know, how people react to the whole PMC thing and try to say like no, actually I really am one of the wretched of the earth.

[Laughter]

30:42 | William: If you take some really roundabout hermeneutical paradigm, you can get there. I sometimes wonder if this is a place to kind of—go check out our psychoanalysis episode—like, I feel like psychoanalysis could provide an explanatory paradigm of repression and guilt going on here, a constant movement of disavowal of something that you know you know, but you don't want to actually express it.

31:08 | Owen: Absolutely, that’s well-put, yeah.

31:10 | William: Which is this difference and it shows that your public countenance really departs from your interior, et cetera. So that was just one thing I wanted to say about this idea that I wonder if there's like this type of guilty conscience happening in philosophy that either is, what Lillian described as larping, or what Owen was describing as your almost repressing the political and saying, obviously the political is a contaminant to philosophy.

The second question I wanted to ask with the Perry Anderson is, okay. So all four of us are trained in philosophy. So I'm wondering what you all think. Is there something distinctive about philosophy that this is a problem? For instance, Perry Anderson doesn't say, well, maybe it's because it didn't end up in English departments, but he doesn't say English, or, um—what are the other

31:56 | Owen: Sociology.

31:57 | William: See, this is how much of a narcissist I am, I'm like: what are the other disciplines that exist?

[Laughter]

32:02 | Gil: What other disciplines exist? Are there any other disciplines?

[Laughter]

32:04 | William: But, you know, is there something particular about—and notice, I didn't even go back. I'm just pretending that—

32:11 | Gil: We're going to just move on. That’s fine. There’s English, sure, whatever.

32:14 | William: There's English. Is there something distinctive about the practice of philosophy that, you know, one can be seduced into this type of larping, but also repressing politics? Is there something about philosophy that wants to connect with what Marxism or Marx is doing and yet is constantly recoiling back from? Because, I wonder, why do philosophers take themselves so seriously on this front of not being contaminated by the world and yet wanting to be like no, no, no, but we really have something to say.

32:45 | Lillian: You know why? Because—well, no, I don't know why, but I can say what other disciplines, like I'm in a political science department now and that kind of like anxious self-awareness, I don't see it.

33:01 | William: Interesting.

33:02 | Lillian: Shout out to my colleagues. Just kidding.

[Laughter]

33:05 | Lillian: All very smart people. But there's not really a lot of like pretenses about, like, the truth-seeking and the whole thing. People are cool with like mid-range truth. The era of like the big sociological theories is over and like, it just seems like people want to accomplish what they can within their limits. The thing that people ask me almost every time I meet them is like: Is there any empirical dimension to your work, or is it—and I quote—‘just’ theoretical? So they have a pretty low opinion about doing things that don't have that kind of mid-range humility.

33:44 | Owen: Yeah, I just do the Queen of the Sciences, that's it.

[Laughter]

33:48 | Lillian: Word! That’s gonna be my thing from now on: I just do Queen shit, I don’t—

[Laughter]

33:58 | William: Sorry peons!

33:59 | Owen: I don’t really fuck with the peon shit, yeah.

[Laughter]

34:01 | Lillian: But I do think that there is something dispositionally different about what a philosopher, when you decided to get serious about it, like wanted to achieve. And even if you end up being smaller and more humble in your wisdom and age, the impulse is different.

34:20 | Gil: There's a really funny line in one of Adorno’s texts on Hegel where he says the Science of Logic is one of the rare books from the canon where, on any given page, you might not only not know what he's talking about, you might not know if there is something that he's talking about.

[Laughter]

34:37 | Gil: And I think that this is yeah, and I think that this is something that philosophy, to go to this question about, like, why is this like anxious sort of self-awareness or lack of self-awareness, specific to philosophy? Philosophers, like, don't even have any sort of agreement about what it is that the object of philosophy is, we don't have—Like, if I studied English, no one's like, what's that about? It's like, oh, it's about English literature, it's about language. If I studied like history or political theory, it's just not a question, if there is even a thing that this is about, whereas philosophy, that's a question, that's an open question. And again, if you put 10 philosophers into a room, you're gonna get 11 different answers.

[Laughter]

35:22 | William: Yeah, the homeboy who's in an argument with himself.

35:25 | Gil: Yeah, he's one guy who's arguing with himself, or he's like it's actually two things because of dialectics or whatever. So I think that, like, this is part of the, the source of the anxiety, and also, let's be super honest, just for a second, philosophy as an academic discipline in terms of producing work with results that is effective? Bad track record, especially for the past century, not great, I think we can all agree, and so there's this need to—

35:54 | William: And when we have had effects? They haven't been great!

35:57 | Gil: It makes sense, then, that professional philosophers would be like no, I insist, this is definitely about something. I am connected to something real. This is like for sure, not just, I don't know, endless textual hermeneutics with no clear goal, object or orientation.

36:13 | William: Man, I gotta be honest, I hate this mirror—

36:18 | Gil: By the way: this, this, while I am trying to become a professor of philosophy!

[Laughter]

36:24 | William: To be clear, I can't wait till this episode is over so I can forget that I read Perry Anderson.

[Laughter]

36:31 | William: Okay, so here. Anyone who knows me well, at least my public persona, like—

36:37 | Lillian: What is Will’s public persona?

36:40 | William: A lot of y'all misunderstand, so I'm gonna tell you what I am. I just, and Lillian kind of said this, I just love examining arguments, and so sometimes I think what makes philosophy distinctive is the argument. You know, we're the ones who do arguments and, believe me, you know we don't always talk about openly, but we often do: we look at other departments, and we’re like, hmm, they're trying to do arguments, but why are they trying to bite our style? We're the ones.

But the thing about arguments is, the reason why I'm like, yeah, fuck it, let's read right-wingers, because I love the idea of making myself slip into them, but I can only do that because I don't think there are going to be political effects of those arguments carrying through, I’m just seeing their internal unity.

And but at the same time it is not just about analyzing arguments and isolation. It is, clearly, we are trying to grasp something, do something in the world, and I think philosophy, we can get kind of drunk on that. That the, the mere analysis, what you know, Gil just called the sort of hermeneutical interpretation, that seems to be—that’s our thing, and it just strikes me as it misunderstands our own sort of historical tendency, but it’s something that can drive a wedge and cause a constant drift away from not just political practice in the sort of spontaneous sense, but even political explanation, examination, et cetera, when all that matters is—the argument. Don’t get me wrong, arguments are cool, though.

38:13 | Gil: Yeah, of course.

38:15 | Owen: Concepts. Concepts are great, love them. Someone's got to work on them.

[Laughter]

38:19 | Gil: To go back to what Lillian said, Lillian said this in the introduction, like a lot of times, I think we would be well served as philosophers to just admit that sometimes the things we're working on is philosophy shit, and that that's not always the same thing as social and political theory. Listen, I've been spending a lot of time recently reading Solomon Maimon because I'm really fascinated by, like, the weird way he's like doing skeptical criticism of Kant in the wake of the first Critique in view of developing a better speculative metaphysical account of the infinite intellect—

38:48 | William: So how does that make communism?

[Laughter]

38:50 | Gil: This doesn’t make communism! This does not make any communism!

38:53 | Owen: But maybe you can't have communism without it? I mean—maybe?

[Laughter]

38:59 | Gil: No, I’m not gonna—I’m not gonna pretend!

39:01 | Owen: Dude, what was Lenin reading in Switzerland before he went and carried out the October 17th Revolution?

39:06 | Gil: Come on! Don’t do it!

39:07 | Owen: He was in the fucking mountains reading the Science of Logic, obsessively!

39:08 | Gil: I know! I know he was reading the Science of Logic, I know he was like, ‘oh, the part on the Absolute—'

39:14 | Owen: But I know, I know but there is a connection, I—I will figure it out one day, between speculative metaphysics and communism. I do believe they're organically linked. One day I will, I will understand it.

[Laughter]

39:22 | William: I'm rooting for you, man!

39:24 | Gil: Yeah, good luck, brother.

[Laughter]

39:29 | Lillian: Okay. So I think maybe one thing that I that I want to add, because I think that's right, the effects of various kinds of philosophical inquiry are not clear. But I also think that, you know, I think what Owen said before, I think you've said on another episode, which is the kind of immanent political nature of most philosophy up until the most recent professionalization and specialization of that skill. So like, when Anderson writes in italics that it became obsessed with philosophy and I was like, he means that literally, I think what the italics are meant to indicate, at least to me—I don't know what Anderson thinks actually, it's meant to indicate an arbitrary narrowing of what that means. Because I think the reason people are attracted to philosophical thought is that it signals a more global kind of grasp of the world, or more global intelligence. So like the mind of Marx that could synthesize those different strands of thought is not going to be replicated by a Marx specialist later

[Laughter]

40:41 | Owen: So true though, it’s so true!

40:42 | William: That kind of blew my mind.

40:44 | Lillian: Okay, it can only be replicated, not as a replication of the same, but I mean like a new synthesis of something by someone who understands political economy, who understands some other area of thought and something else and genuinely tries to grab the world through them. Like, that’s what will repli—yeah.

41:03 | Owen: Even if you only get two of them, like, this is what we talked about in the Mike Davis episode. Like he took political economy, and that pamphleteering, like, agitating part of Marx's work and tried to do that kind of work, basically never talking about Marx. And that, to me, is a way more faithful, you know—okay, granted, it doesn't have the, it doesn't have to deal with the question of philosophy and what the hell its immanent connection is to those things—but that, to me, is an example of working in the legacy of, working in Marxism, not working on Marxism.

41:35 | Gil: Right, but this is to Anderson's point, right, like, this is why Western Marxism can be seen as having gone in, reversing the trajectory of Marx's own thought: Marx started out doing like philosophy, and he's like oh, we got to settle accounts with Feuerbach, and, like you know, oh, like you know, we got to think about, like, species being and alienation, and then at some point he was like—

41:53 | William: Got to kill Proudhon!

41:55 | Yeah, yeah, I got to kill Proudhon, right! And then at some point he was like, actually, I don't need to talk about that shit at all.

42:01 | Owen: First of all, it’s 1848, who gives a fuck about that shit? Like Europe is on fire.

42:05 | Gil: Yeah, at a certain point, just because you just said, Owen, that Yeah, granted, Mike Davis's work doesn't have to grapple with the questions of philosophy, but like, in a way, neither did Marx's, when we get to Capital, right? Like, he kind of sets it aside, and I think that this is to Anderson's point. Maybe there's something important there.

42:22 | William: Maybe the small plea I can give for what could be left of philosophy is, you know—

42:30 | Gil: I can't believe we're answering the question of the show today!

[Laughter]

42:32 | William: I know. Why keep listening?

42:35 | Gil: It’s our last episode. Show’s over, guys!

42:38 | Owen: It’s our first meta episode.

42:40 | William: Done.

But what Anderson is describing is, you know, as academic philosophy, these figures, they got narrower even as they got more complex with the philosophical concepts, and really they got narrower because they understood literally their own contemporaries less and less. But it seems to me that one of the promises of philosophy, at least in principle, is this notion of totality. And when philosophy kind of gave up on that concept, to say it's too ambitious, it’s totalitarian, all that matters are specific arguments, and all of that—I mean, you know, there's a way of thinking of totality in the ideal sense of, as if, like, I'm going to know everything.

Or you could think of totality in the way that—You look at what Marx is doing, which is bringing richer and richer determinations together, responding to his historical moment, and you're recouping that in a theory that's alive and well. And philosophy kind of has this promise of, you could understand the world, the world can be brought into it. But once you give up on that ambition, I mean, what does philosophy become? And I think we start to see what's left of it.

43:47 | Owen: What’s left of it.

[Laughter]

43:48 | Lillian: Yeah. It looks like philosophy can't be done in the midrange. Not really, you know, like, we started with Plato and Aristotle. You can't do that shit in the midrange.

[Laughter]

43:59 | William: Yeah, they’re narrow figures, they don’t have high ambitions.

44:05 | Owen: I mean maybe you can choose a section of the big range, you know, you choose an area in the big range, but never losing sight of the fact that—

44:13 | Lillian: You can be in a lane, yeah.

44:15 | Owen: —yeah, that you're trying to—you’re working in a corner of a social totality that you're trying to conceptualize.

44:20 | Gil: Well, I mean, to be clear: What you're working in the corner of, is a little corner of the absolute.

44:24 | Owen: That is, I was going to say: dynamic totality, you can say it's, I don't know, you could say it's like social economic life, or it's the absolute, depending on what your persuasion is.

[Laughter]

44:33 | William: But it's just fascinating what happens even to theory. It's not just theories cut off from practice, because I think the thing is that actually, philosophers, we do still engage in practice, just you're probably not going to like the practice we do do—

[Laughter]

44:45 | William: —disciplining one another, lots of meetings, you know, all of that. Yeah, those are practices, you know.

[Laughter]

44:55 | Owen: Sounding smart at parties.

44:57 | William: Oh, so good at that, so much time in that practice. But when you give up on, you know, responding to the world in its real essential relations, you can see—again, like, I don't think Anderson is blaming Sartre and all of that, but that does wound the very project of Marxism. And when philosophy withdrew from that, it does start to become this thing that represses its political urges or tries to pretend that no, this really small thing I'm doing, no, that's actually revolutionary—if, again, if you look at it correctly. And so this is just me saying: philosophy, embrace totality again.

45:34 | Owen: That's our program.

45:35 | Gil: I just want to echo that and say that this is why, again, I think Adorno is the apex, or the nadir, I guess, of Western Marxism, as Anderson describes it Like when he quotes him towards the end of the chapter on formal shifts, and he's like here's Adorno: “Theory is a form of practice and practice itself is an eminently theoretical concept.” End quote. And Anderson comments: “the defiant theoreticism of these pronouncements, effectively suppressing the whole material problem of the unity of theory and practice as a dynamic bond between Marxism and the mass revolutionary struggle,” is just like the characteristic general motto of Western Marxism in the epoch after the second world war. Like, come on, man. In fact, the articulation of theory and practice is a problem. You can't just say, oh, theory is practice and practice is theoretical. Like done, nailed it.

46:23 | Lillian: Yeah, then I'm just doing practice when I write it.

46:26 | Gil: I'm just doing practice right now. Yeah, don't worry about it.

46:28 | Owen: That's such a cool thing to say when, like, the dude had best aloofness towards practice and at worst just like total scorn, but somehow sought to unify them on the theoretical side.

46:41 | Gil: That's not idealism, by the way.

46:42 | William: Someday, someday we got to do an episode on the Adorno's “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis.” It is crazy, and you get the rich pessimism there where he's just like Unfortunately, practice isn't possible at the moment, so the best we can do is theory, holding itself to account and examining itself.

47:02 | Owen: Man, he's got such a funny drag of Adorno in there. Because he's describing the process of moving the Frankfurt School to the United States. Everyone has moved to New York. He's like now it's embedded and it's totally detached at this point from any working class movements, any working class struggle.

47:18 | Gil: Right, because there was none in the US at the time.

47:19 | Owen: And he talks about how, like Adorno and Horkheimer ended up, they adapted very well to their milieu, their new milieu, as he puts it. Basically, like conservatism, apoliticism, don't say a single word about socialism. And then he says but it gets even worse, and they go back to Germany and it's West Germany after the war where, like the Communist Party's outlawed, like you know, the left basically becomes illegal because it's overseen by the Americans and the British. He said it kind of corrupted Horkheimer a little bit. He started doing like weird apologias for capitalism, but Adorno actually wasn't really that affected because he never gave a shit about any politics or practice anyways. So he’s got this, this weird underhanded dig where he's like Adorno's thoughts on politics weren't affected because he doesn't have any.

48:04 | Gil: Because he didn't have any!

[Laughter]

48:06 | Owen: I mean, that’s a great joke. Yeah.

48:08 | William: That’s my king right there.

48:14 | Lillian: There’s a point that I think is a little, maybe, meta-political, that I've noticed about the way like Europeans relate to their own working classes and that I guess this text helped me to think about, just a little bit. So before I say this, middle class Americans likewise hate their own working classes, like or like North Americans do.

I think the issue that what makes it different is that they also deny that they have a class structure, so everyone gets to talk about their bootstraps and everybody gets to act like they came from humble beginnings and so on and so forth. And there's a mass culture that like kind of denies the obvious strength of class divisions in the United States and I think in North America as a whole.

49:01 | Owen: Everyone self-reports as middle class, regardless of where you are in the stratification, yeah.

49:07 | Lillian: What I've noticed is that European, like middle class radicals have a genuine hostility to their own working classes, in a way that I find a little—this is a generalization, you know. If European listeners want to push back it fine.

I'm just saying, like the strands of radicalism in Europe that I am aware of that are kind of further afield from, more Marxian cohorts, but also in that milieu as well, have a real antagonism to their own working classes as being failures of living too large, of not living up to their cultural expectations.

And I think that the intellectual world that was inherited from this kind of divorce with socialist tradition and practice has unfortunately, like, enabled this, because people get to continue to call themselves radicals and socialists and actually hate their constituency.

[Laughter]

I find this extremely troubling. You know, like it's kind of funny, but it's actually not funny when you think about it, that you start to realize that like the traditional socialist base is perceived as mostly the problem by middle-class radicals, and it has to be that you don't have any actual political experience outside of a middle-class milieu that can make you think that. I just I guess maybe I kind of wanna, these are maybe my more concluding thoughts about this essay, it's self-indulgent to talk about, like, what are philosophers doing and so on, but there's more of a meta point about thinking about how to relate to a constituency that you identify with or that want to identify with.

Because all of the people of the classical tradition were middle-class people, except for Gramsci and a couple others. But they were in a life-world where they understood, and I've said this on previous episodes that when the right gain votes, they showed up to the meeting, the party meeting and were like: What did we do wrong? They were fanatics. You know, they were fanatics about this, and we don't have that. We have fanatics about whether or not people are perceived to be good people by other people.

51:29 | Owen: Yeah: why are working class people so dumb and malicious?

51:34 | Lillian: Why are they so dumb? And I started calling this in my work recently a Manichean way of thinking about class politics where, like, people mostly deserve the support of morally good middle-class people when they are also morally good.

[Laughter]

51:49 | Lillian: And if they seem to be doing something objectionable or they might be like a little right wing or mixed politics, like there's some reaction. You smell some reactionary elements, that can't be the real working class, that's not your base. And this is at the discretion of people who theorize and then get to choose, and I think a big difference with, like, the classical tradition is that those middle-class intellectuals, they didn't get to choose their base. They realized that they had to fight for it because that's what the movement was doing.

52:23 | Owen: Oh, that's what mass politics requires. You can't have mass politics with such a discriminating attitude towards your constituency.

52:31 | Lillian: Exactly that's it. I think the difference and I think what we've now realized is that the decline of mass politics, that maybe in 1976 was not what Anderson was calling it at the time, I think that's what he was seeing happening, the collapse of that.

52:48 | William: My concluding question is: The thing that I like that philosophy constantly provokes me to do, is that when people say things, I ask what do they mean by that? And so what I mean is clearly the outcome of this is theory, at least the type of theory that you want to engage in, that tries to understand and change the world, when it's severed from practice, let's just say it goes through mutations. I think some things that Althusser and all of them did were really rich and interesting. I think the concept of overdetermination is very provocative, but a lot of people keep saying the thing that Marx took to be a problem to be solved rather than assume that it would happen, which is the relationship between theory and practice. And it seems to me that that is a relation that has to constantly be rethought, of what that's going to look like, and I think what the Anderson left me with is two questions.

One, what would it have looked like for these figures that he's analyzing to try to actually solve that problem again? And I think that's a really hard counterfactual question. In some ways, the way Anderson is describing it is like these were figures, these were men who were kind of subject to the historical conditions that they themselves were not the product of. But then I think the question is, what would theory and practice look like for us today, those of us reflecting on this, reflecting on these historical failures, reflecting on the distortion of philosophy? It's a turn against the type of base it claims to want to speak for, and all of that.

And I'm just wondering what it could look like for philosophy even if philosophy isn't the head or anything like that, for it to actually resume that connection between theory and practice. Does that only happen by maybe, that's work that we do when we're not professional philosophers? Is that us taking Hegel's Science of Logic and going down to the labor union, meeting, like, let's also discuss this?

[Laughter]

54:43 | William: I'm kind of joking, but I'm also I'm kind of serious. The thing about Marx's method that I really love is not just the totality, it's the historicality of it, that you can't just rest on your laurels, you have to re-win what these social conditions are, what they demand of us. And I find myself not knowing exactly the answer to the question of what the link between theory and practice looks like in the wake of these generations of defeat. Perhaps a resurgent labor union, but nowhere near the heights. What could it look like? And I don't think that there's an easy answer. I'm just saying that's a question, I think.

55:22 | Gil: Yeah, yeah, I wanted to end here, maybe in following up on that, by sharing with you guys a couple of lines from the last chapter before the Afterword from the book, because he quotes Lenin. He says I'm gonna give Lenin the last word, so I'm giving Anderson the last word on Lenin. Whatever. The quote from Lenin is, quote, “correct, revolutionary theory assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.” And then he says: that's five conditions, right, you could do revolutionary theory by yourself, even in the academy, presumably. But that revolutionary theory won't assume a quote correct and final form unless it's in close connection with a mass movement that is itself revolutionary. So even if you're like you know, going down to the shop, but they're a bunch of reformists, that's still not gonna make it possible for you to do correct and true final form revolutionary theory.

And he says those five conditions just have been lacking. But you know he's like maybe there's a chance that they're coming back, that those conditions could be met. But then he ends by saying: “When a truly revolutionary movement is born in a mature working class, the final shape of theory will have no exact precedent. All that can be said is that when the masses themselves speak, theoreticians of the sort the West has produced for 50 years will necessarily be silent.” I think that's probably true. That sounds right to me.

[Laughter]

56:48 | William: That’s fair. That's fine.

56:49 | Lillian: That does it for us today. New episodes of What's Left of Philosophy come out every two weeks wherever you get your podcasts…

[End]