On the Crisis of Liberalism IV: Can the History of Defeated Marxism Teach Liberals Anything?

[This is part of an ongoing series of occasion pieces on the crisis of liberalism, recall here, here, here; see also here--ES] 

Some general facets can be discerned at once. Western Marxism, as we have seen, was progressively inhibited from theoretical confrontation of major economic or political problems, from the 1920s onwards. Gramsci was the last of its thinkers to broach central issues of class struggle directly in his writings. He too, however, wrote nothing about the capitalist economy itself, in the classical sense of analysing the laws of motion of the mode of production as such. After him, an equivalent silence typically shrouded the political order of bourgeois rule, and the means of overthrowing it, as well. The result was that Western Marxism as a whole, when it proceeded beyond questions of method to matters of substance, came to concentrate overwhelmingly on study of superstructures. Moreover, the specific superstructural orders with which it showed the most constant and close concern were those ranking 'highest' in the hierarchy of distance from the economic infrastructure, in Engels's phrase. In other words, it was not the State or Law which provided the typical objects of its research. It was culture that held the central focus of its attention.--Perry Anderson (1976) Considerations on Western Marxism, pp. 75-6. [A neat footnote on Sraffa and Gramsci has been omitted--ES.]

Anderson writes before the fall of the Berlin Wall. But his Considerations is a history of defeat in two senses: first, where the revolution occurred and succeeded (Russia and those countries conquered/inspired by it), Marxism itself (or true Marxism) was defeated by what Anderson sometimes calls 'Stalinism' and sometimes call  'bureacratization' (that is, the capture of the party by the bureaucratic interests and the suppression of worker freedom). Second, in lots of places -- including the 'Western' lands that are the focus of his Considerations -- the forces of capital (sometimes in alliance with fascism) were objectively stronger than the would-be-marxist forces. My interest here is not about the sources of defeat, but the sources of the inherent limitations of western Marxism diagnosed by Anderson.

For, Anderson's book is not meant to be defeatist. It is written after the events of 1968, and he has hopeful due to the "re-emergence of revolutionary masses outside the control of a bureaucratized party rendered potentially conceivable the unification of Marxist theory and working class-practice again." (95) This sentence makes clear what Anderson takes to be the source of these inherent limitations: the split between theory -- primarily developed (by philosophers) within the university -- and working-class praxis. (Gramsci is treated as a partial exception.)  

It would be interesting to learn from more knowledgeable others which social movements today have managed to overcome the split between theory and practice. My lack of familiarity with the details with various social movements prevents me from pontificating on this (but recall this post on Dotson; and this guest post on Graeber.)

But Anderson's book did get me thinking about the shortcomings of liberalism of the last few decades. If Marxism became too much of an academic enterprise dis-associated from movement building (and too focused on epistemological and methodological issues), could the same be said about recent liberalism? Surely, the now stalemated debate over ideal/non-ideal theory reflects something of a similar unease. 

From a historical perspective, in the first wave (recall) of liberalism (roughly, recall, 1776-1914), there were many major liberal thinkers who were also active in politics (one just has to mention Mill and Tocqueville, but the list is much longer). During the second wave (from 1945-2008), plenty of liberal thinkers were influential on policy through their status as professional economists or through their role in shaping jurisprudence. But even so, starting perhaps with Max Weber, the major political philosophers/theorists of second wave liberalism (Rawls, Nozick, Raymond Aron, Habermas, etc.)* were not especially active in government.** 

One clear problem that liberals have is our inability to mobilize as liberals against the illiberal (nationalist, racialist, authoritarian) encroachment on liberal practices. This is no surprise because liberal political theory of the second wave is not just an academic enterprise, but one that is, by and large, a liberalism that (as its critics argue) assumes it's the only live option (even Rawlsian political liberalism assumes liberals are hegemonic). Now critics of liberalism have noticed that this has created the tendency of liberals of treating illiberal positions as fundamentally irrational. While I think this is a huge problem, today I ignore it. Rather, I want to call attention to three bad effects.

First, liberal theory has ignored the significance of leadership and mobilization. As I have noted before, modern liberals tend to dislike talk of leadership--we prefer rules, procedures, impartial laws, and public reason. But a lot of collective action and mobilization problems require some kind of organizing and leadership. In addition, the maintenance of a liberal public culture and institutions, even the transmission of power, also requires leadership (recall this post). 

Second, because liberals prefer (emancipatory) rules, procedures, impartial laws, and public reason, we have too often ceded 'democracy' to populists and nationalists. (It has not helped that Stateside, one of the main parties, the Republicans, as Jacob Levy has argued, has also had undemocratic instincts when it comes to dis-enfranchisement, while the other party, the Democrats,  has been eager to work with the courts when it could to achieve major policy ends.) This means that fundamentally illiberal conceptions of democracy in terms of unconstrained majoritarianism or 'the people' have been gaining ground.+ In so far as liberals have a theory of (voter) mobilization, it's a negative one in terms of rent-seeking/capture of special interests (recall here and here). 

The two bad effects combine, third, in the tendency of second-wave liberalism to treat voters as ignorant and to embrace either (among mainstream liberals) technocracy or (among libertarian friendly types) markets (or both) as an alternative to democracy. It's hard to see how to make liberalism a popular political program if it insults those on whose good opinion and support it would have to rely in a crisis. This is not to deny that liberalism is (recall) rooted in the thought that political life requires institutional response(s) to human imperfection (including immorality). But each of these responses/institutions (rule of law, separation of powers, international treaties, role of markets, etc.) could be defended on positive grounds in terms of important values and consequences (without, as it were, reminding the voters of their own immorality/ignorance). In political practice, there is little defense of them.++ 

That liberals lost the political ability to defend their liberal values in the political arena has, I think, become most clear by the authoritarian and polarizing responses to the tendency of some Muslim citizens to radicalize. Rather than treating such radicalization as an invitation to reflect on the ways in which liberal society fails to due justice to the aspirations of its own citizens and falls short of its own ideals, we have welcomed a robust defense of 'Western' culture that through its various manifestations (war on terror, state of emergency, etc.) is increasingly encouraging rejectionism of liberal values by the electorate. We are routinely asked, in zero-sum fashion, to pick sides in a clash of civilizations, rather than (as the liberal sensitivity demands) looking for win-win futures.

Winning the cold war, and the passage of time, left liberalism unprepared for its own fragility. By this I do not mean that liberalism would be un-competitive in great power rivalry with, say, China. But rather, that liberal theoretical development became, in part, unmoored from liberal political practice (in so far as that liberal practice became too closely identified with economic theory/jurisprudence). And while such division of labor is itself a consequence of liberal success, I fear it has also encouraged the idea that we can muddle our way through, each of us doing our own thing.   

 

 

*The same can be said for many of the critics of liberalism, Foucault, Arendt, Chomsky, Mouffe, Iris Marion Young, etc. 

*Isaiah Berlin, Bernard Williams, and Martha Nussbaum may be partial exceptions to this list. Surely there are more? 

+ Stateside, the attack on the electoral college, while completely understandable, will also lead to a more majoritarian culture. 

++In Europe, the EU institutional design has many imperfections. But the worst is that it incentivized national politicians and entrenched economic actors, to blame the liberal institutions (of the EU) for (any) existing problems (while the politicians could take credit for any successes or 'opt out'), while creating no mechanisms by which voters could be jointly responsible for European outcomes. I am not denying that there has been successful, partial mobilization against some authoritarian tendencies. That's for a different post. 

Comments

[Aaron Lercher]

Great post.
(1) Marxism is closer to social engineering than liberalism, so the failure of revolutions in rich countries around 1920 refuted a theory in a way that liberalism as a normative theory cannot be refuted.
(2) To the extent we view liberalism as social engineering, then we see liberal institutions failed to protect people from harm due to the financial crisis (although things were much better than the Great Depression). To the extent we view liberalism as social engineering, then we see China's new prosperity refutes the idea that liberty is necessary for prosperity.
(3) As you say, some reductive conceptions of liberalism might suggest that politics or collective action is worthless, but that should be taken as a reductio ad absurdum.
(4) The greatest success of liberalism since about 1980 (when Rawls and Habermas flourished) is the expansion of women’s rights in both rich and poor countries. This shows how liberalism works in practice: people are already on the move, and liberalism constructs institutions and policies to accommodate them. There are as many forms of liberty as there are ways of being human.
(5) The consequentialist and economic arguments for admitting many immigrants to rich societies are strong and obvious. Merkel the technocrat knew that. The rights argument for admitting many immigrants is strong and obvious, since many of them are fleeing harm.
(6) This leaves, by process of elimination, “virtue” or “communitarian” arguments as the only possible arguments for restricting immigration. Nussbaum already has a much better virtue theory than these bad ones.
(7) Unlike European Marxists around 1920, liberal intellectuals today do not need to create new research methods and new collective groups. There is a global flood of intellectual work that one can to sift through. It’s likely someone else has already done some of the work.
(8) In (political) practice, what persuades people that immigrants are okay is living with them. If people see immigrants only on television or the internet, then they can be led to mistrust them. Also, in both the US and in the Netherlands, we have learned that rightwing politicians can seize attention by amusing citizens with telegenic hairstyles and bombastic rhetoric.

[Aaron Lercher]

Maybe I can make a better comment. I'm somewhat obsessed with both the crisis of Marxism and the current crisis of liberalism, but never thought to put these explicitly in parallel.

In my view, Marxists around 1920 were - by their own terms - failing to see many important facts. Among these are: (1) the potential power of the working class was by 1920 no longer, if ever, explained by Marx's theory of value, surplus value, and productive labor; (2) in rich countries by 1920 most workers were service workers who are non-productive according to Marx; (3) class conflict is not the master problem for solving all social problems; (4) historical teleology (pushing us toward a resolution of social problems) is false; (5) instead, one is forced to deal with the messy reality of norms and judgment (including judgments regarding moral norms regarding liberties).

All these facts were possibly within the range for discovery by Gramsci and the empirically-minded Frankfurt School, and Korsch sounded the alarm that theory was out of step with reality.

Can the current crisis of liberalism be understood as partly a failure by liberals to face some pertinent facts?

Maybe to some extent. It seems to me that to the extent Tooze's Crashed is an accurate account of the financial crisis, many outstanding facts about "financialization" are only dimly recognized by liberals. Piketty’s book also sounds an alarm that we don’t have the political ability to respond to. This may make it seem to some voters that anti-liberal nationalism is the only viable response being offered them. It also is clear that Rawls’s theory fails to address the moral rights of immigrants, although Nussbaum and Benhabib do.

If reality changes, but ideology does not keep up, then it is tempting to believe that a decisive leader can restore the pleasing parts of an old reality by turning back the clock on the displeasing parts of the new reality. I think Corbyn and Sanders somewhat represent that temptation, although that isn’t all they offer. Obviously, that’s what Trump and other authoritarians offer.