It’s no secret that the
collapse of international communism from 1989 to 1991 forced many
Marxists into defensive positions. What’s less well understood is why so
many others took the opportunity to abjure some of Marxism’s most
hallowed principles. Perry Anderson, in a surprisingly admiring
review-essay on Francis Fukuyama from 1992, concluded by soberly
assessing what remained of socialism. At the center of socialist
politics, he wrote, had always been the idea that a new order of things
would be created by a militant working class, “whose self-organization
prefigured the principles of the society to come.” But in the real
world, this group had “declined in size and cohesion.” It wasn’t that it
had simply moved from the developed West to the East; even at a global
level, he noted, “its relative size as a proportion of humanity is
steadily shrinking.” The upshot was that one of the fundamental tenets
of Marxism was wrong. The future offered an increasingly smaller,
disorganized working class, incapable of carrying out its historic role.
In 1992, calling oneself a “socialist” was an anachronism.
Today it is a label with which millions of Americans identify. A
self-described “democratic socialist” came agonizingly close to winning
the Democratic Party primaries in 2016. And the premise that Anderson
felt we should abandon has been nonchalantly reassumed. Articles in Jacobin,
the most popular socialist publication to appear in the United States
in decades, routinely conclude with a reaffirmation of the place of the
working class at the center of socialist politics.
But lost in the heady rush of leftist revival is the
still-nagging problem of agency. The fortunes of the organized working
class have never been more dire. In the advanced capitalist core, unions
have recovered some prestige but not even a fraction of their
midcentury power, while the historical European parties of the Socialist
International continue their slow collapse. In the Global South, the
Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) and South Africa’s ANC–Communist–trade
union alliance, rare bright spots after 1989, are losing credibility
after decades of accommodation to private economic prerogatives. There
are, in absolute terms, more industrial workers than ever, and probably
as much industrial conflict. But there is no sense that as the working
class becomes larger, it is becoming more unified. The end of the end of
history has not seen the resumption of the forward march of labor.
In fact, Marxists have been worried about workers for a
long time. After 1917, workers tried to take power in Germany, Italy,
Hungary, and Spain; their defeat led to fascism. Beginning with Antonio
Gramsci, Marxists outside the Soviet Union tried to understand what went
wrong. As fascism and armed resistance gave way to social democracy and
a moderated capitalism, some radicals consigned the working class to
history altogether. It was harder, though, to discard the idea that someone,
somehow, would bring socialism to the world. Peasants,
national-liberation movements, students, and the incarcerated all
provided substitutes. With the emergence of movements like
environmentalism and gay liberation after the 1960s, many decided that
the whole idea of a revolutionary subject was misguided. Why not
recognize a plurality of movements, emerging unpredictably and united
not by objective interest but by creative alliances? Today, even as
discussions of economic inequality abound, this pluralism remains common
sense in activist circles.
But this solution has not satisfied everyone. In 2008, a
slim journal published by an anonymous collective began to circulate
within the thinning ranks of the revolutionary left. Its cover was solid
green except for the journal’s name, Endnotes, in white, and a
subtitle, “Preliminary Materials for a Balance Sheet of the Twentieth
Century,” in black. The text was produced by a discussion group formed
in Brighton, UK, in 2005 with origins in long-running debates in the
German and French ultraleft. (Over time the group broadened to include
participants in California.) Authorship wasn’t really secret; you could
find bylined references scattered across CVs and footnotes. But
collective authorship was key to the distinctive voice, something like
the crossfire of an unusually well-prepared reading group recollected in
tranquility. The essays run on, sometimes more than ten thousand words,
to simulate the modulations of conversation. Disciplinary
specializations sit side by side, with notes on Kant and Schelling
following graphs of employment patterns in UK manufacturing. The style
is by turns earnest (“The communisation of social relations among seven
billion people will take time”), bleak (“There is always someone more
abject than you”), and droll (“Proletarians do not have to see anyone
they do not like, except at work”). It is a journal whose scope, rigor,
and utter lack of piety make it one of the consistently challenging
left-wing periodicals of our time. In 2014, Anderson himself called it
one of the “most impressive publications to emerge in the Bush-Obama
era.”
More at https://nplusonemag.com/issue-28/reviews/the-bleak-left/
