In the Flight Path of Perry Anderson Author(s): Peter Linebaugh Source: History Workshop, No. 21 (Spring, 1986), pp.

141-146 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4288684 Accessed: 05/07/2010 23:55
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History Workshop.

http://www.jstor.org

In the Flight Path of Perry Anderson by Peter Linebaugh

We're30,000 feet above the ground.Delta flight #697, Washington,D.C. to New Orleans.The pilot tells us to look over the left wing of the Boeing and we'll be able to see Atlanta, Georgia. PerryAnderson'srecent update on histmat, In the Tracksof HistoricalMaterialism(Verso 1983), is the flight time reading. Marxism falls, of course, massivelyand pre-eminently into the category of those systemsof thoughtconcernedwith the natureand directionof society as a whole. What is distinctive about the kind of criticism that historical materialismin principlerepresents, is that it includes indivisiblyand unremittingly, self-criticism. That is, Marxism is a theoryof historythat lays claim, at the same stroke, to provide a historyof theory. The adverbs are good - 'massively,' 'pre-eminently,''indivisibly,' 'unThis is going to be a brillianttheory that will be useful at the remittingly.' conference. First, though Atlanta, and then we can return to Perry Anderson'scorrectcanon of talking heads. Atlantahas the busiestairportin the U.S., busierthan Chicago.To look at the pilot's Atlanta, the dots of orange lights below, I must lean over a fat, young, hairlessman who wipes the steak juices from the cornersof his mouthwith a linen serviettebefore turninganotherpage of his flight time reading,a big book all aboutGod. I guess that PerryAndersonwouldhave heard about Atlanta, it was much touted under JimmyCarteras the epicenter of the 'New South' and its mayor and former Civil Rights leader, Andy Young, a world politician. Atlanta is a financial center of the Sunbelt, the region where capital, seeking to escape the no-work, wage,

142

Journal HistoryWorkshop

and welfare demands of the mid-west, removed itself from the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes whichfor a centuryhad providedthe geology and civilization.'That civilizationspewed out value in waterwaysof 'industrial the form of smoke, steel, cars, and bucks, and spawned the huge CIO Unions, millenarianmovementslike the Nation of Islam, and a workingclass of former slaves, former hillbillies, and former European peasants who were unafraidof municipalinsurrections. The sunbeltis a region that has produced two revolutions; first, from slave bondage during what DuBois called 'the general strike' of 1860-64, and second, the revolt againstthe second-classcitizenshipthat Rosa Parksset in motion when she refused to sit in the back of the bus back in December 1955. The region now sells the commoditiesof the '80s - aerospaceweaponry,cocaine and marijuana, computersand electronics.These are producedby a proletariat that consists on the one hand of immigrantsfrom Cuba, S.E. Asia, and Central America, and on the other hand, by the great-grandchildren of slaves whose first-classcitizenshipincludes neither CIO wages nor safety for its children.This proletariatis ruled by terror:the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the CIA, the Klan and the Nazis, child murderers,the electric chair and the injection needle. Our 'Atlanta'is yellow dots. The lady next to me is dressed-for-success, only her jacket is folded and stowed in the bin above, accordingto Federal Regulations. She reads the Wall StreetJournal. She is an attorney for a Louisianaoil refinery.She is personable.Her newspaperdoes not remark that this day, 21 February 1985, is the twentieth anniversaryof the assassinationof MalcolmX, 'our shiningblack prince.' Down the aisle a banker reads Allen Nevins' biographyof Henry Ford. There is serious reading up here in the sky - God, Ford, the Wall StreetJournal, and Histmat. Could this be a 'commanding height'?Could this be a 'moment' of capitalist planning? Capital needs its God, its chronicles of surplus value, its histories of entrepreneurs,could it be that it also needs its historicalmaterialism? CouldPerrybe partof it? He is so good for northAmericanconferences, especiallythe inter-disciplinary ones where sociologists,historians,economists, anthropologists,and philosophers,not to mention the lit crits, can set aside their vanities and find a common diction in Perry Anderson's histmat. Even if you're not a professor, his books are wonderful for vocabularybuilding,phrase stoppers, and seminarslogans:
exorbitation of language apodictic experience conation conjured up serried studies attenuation of truth mortmain of Stalin capsizal of structures exiguous fragments free-wheeling nescience magically sublated lability of political purely aleatory the basic demarche irenic universalism

His is the languageof refined,abstracttexts: it is not languageto be heard, or listenedto, not the talk of kitchen,cafeteria,laundromat, bowlingalley,

Flight Path of Perry Anderson

143

or office. It is a language of novelty, reassurance, neologisms, histmat, and the stratosphere. It's an international lingo, like the sabir of the ancient Mediterranean or Masonic signs, that is useful for the ultramontane project that he conveys. 'Ultramontane' means 'across the mountains.' It refers to a theological tendency that took direction from the Vatican rather than the secular rulers north of the Alps. It is authoritarian and unresponsive to pressures from below. The diction is nothing without its militance. 'Siege,' 'bastion,' 'stronghold,' 'arsenal,' 'zones,' 'post,' and 'vanguard' fall from his pen. The metaphors arise from the Baroque style of warfare, theorized by Clausewitz. The war of the hellhole of the assembly line, of survival in mean streets, of the dispossessed in Bantuslands, of coyote trails and the sanctuary movement, are unknown to him. He lives in an interesting timewarp: partly Baroque, partly public-school Bohemian, partly 60s-style Trotskyism. He writes as if a white man could still get away with writing about Marxist revolution as a matter of white talking heads: first are the bearded great-grandfathers - Engels, Plekanhov and Kautsky; then come along the idealists - Korsch, Gramsci and Lukacs; they are followed by Sartre, Colletti and Adorno who are replaced by the men on the cover of the book - Habermas, Foucault, Derrida and Lacan. These are the great men whose writings either comprise, or are considered by Anderson for admission to, the canon of histmat. Anderson is a censor, a subtle, metaphysical censor, like those who sat at the Council of Trent in the 1540s and 1550s, drawing up an Index of permissible and forbidden books, with the difference that the Vatican censors at least formulated and published the norms of OK books. Anderson doesn't do this; to him histmat is a virtual doctrine for and by university, metropolitan intellectuals whose interests are not in analyzing, recording and documenting European struggles but in the modification, revision, and continuation of the academic disciplines by means of weighty cross-disciplinary jargons. The sites of Marxism as a discourse gradually became displaced from trade unions and political parties to research institutes and university departments. Inaugurated with the rise of the Frankfurt School in the late twenties and early thirties, the change was virtually absolute by the period of the High Cold War in the fifties, when there was scarcely a Marxist theoretician of any weight who was not the holder of a chair in the academy, rather than a post in the class struggle. It is an interesting turn of phrase. It is if as there were a pool of trained histmaticians. Upon graduation they may either take chairs in universities, or be 'posted' somewhere in the class struggle, very much as a bank manager might be 'posted' to Sao Paulo, or a diplomat be 'posted' to Karachi. What do they then do? Derrida picks cotton with the Sandinista? Foucault cleans toilets at Attica? Habermas learns Turkish at a VW plant? Lacan peers through microscopes assembling semi-conductors? And then Perry Anderson collects their reports and advances 'industrial proletariat's revolution'? It does not ever occur to Anderson that not only is history

144

HistoryWorkshop Journal

made by the workingclass, but that we produceour own historians.Whyis C.L.R. Jamesnot mentioned?Why not WalterRodney?Why not Meridel LeSueur?Why not Malcolm X? Were Anderson to listen to the world aroundhim he would have found that the 'Marxistdiscourse'was present in plenty of places besides 'the posts' and 'chairs'he spies. It will be found in Brixton, in the prisons and plants of Brazil, in the mountains of Nicaragua, on the quays of Singapore, in the Philippine crews of oil tankers, in the ladies' rooms of corporate headquarters. From those 'discourses' sometimes a person may find money and time (Rodney, James, or Malcolm)to read, to write, to assimilatehistoricalexperience, of our class. and to distill the motions and accomplishments Anderson, occasionallylapses and appearstired by the whole business: Habermashas attempteda direct structuralanalysisof the immanent tendenciesof contemporary capitalismand of the possibilityof systemchanging crises arising from them - in keeping with the traditional project of historicalmaterialism. Anderson'snotion of the 'workingclass'is antiquatedand boring;it is like his notion of the 'economy';in fact, his notions of these are complements of one another:equallyabstract,equallyremote, equallyinfrequentin his thinking, a vast distance separatingthem both. In fact, as in theory, as anyone ought to know, they are but two sides of one another, that is what 'capital' means. Anderson ruefully notes that the theory of European A 'zest for histmathas been displacedby Anglo-Americanhistoriography. the concrete' has replacedthe abstractstructuralism and hermeneuticsof Europeanuniversities.This hasn'tyet affectedAndersonwho can write of the new 'naturalism'(an alternative to histmat, he believes) without mentioninglife or death, animals,vegetables, or minerals.Who digs the copper, zinc, cobalt, gold, and coal? Who grows the soya beans and the cocoa? Who makes the silicon? Who cooks supper? What are their relationsand forces of production? Questions of this kind have always been the point of departure of histmat, the analysis of class relations depends on the analysis of value relations (income, work, time) which depends on knowledge of the concrete conditions of productionand reproduction.Philosophy, 'structures,' theory would then change as a result. In the 1950s James, Castoriades,Glaberman,and Rawickdid this. More recentlyit was done again (but differently of course) by activist thinkers in Italy such as Mariarosa dalla Costa and Negri. The latter anticipated the workers councils, the '68 Revolt; the former anticipatedthe strugglesfor social wages and reintroduced to 'visibility' the struggle for wages against housework. Neither traditionnor the class movements upon which they rested find any considerationin these pages. Anderson has a 'Postscript'.Here he notes the feministmovement, the ecology movement, and the peace movement. Because he is incapableof understanding these in terms of the opposingmovementsof capital, or of their relationships to the class fragmentation and reorganizations that have followed the Yom Kippur War of 1973 ('the protractedpostwar boom

FlightPath of PerryAnderson

145

came to an abrupthalt,' he says), he regardsthem as outsidethe purviewof Marxisthistmat.He thinksthat they may help Marxisthistmatdevelop an 'ethics.' Yet, his understanding of them is ignorant: The division between the sexes is a fact of nature: it cannot be abolished,as can the divisionbetweeen classes, a fact of history. After capitalistand workerhave long vanished,women and men will remain. . . .could the struggle against sexual dominationever provide the main impetus for a wider human liberation, tidily sweeping class strugglealong with it to a common victory?The answeris plainly no. Plainspeakingindeed. This comes from a man who is a genealogistof that patrilinearclan whose venerated ancestor is FrederickEngels, author of The Originof the Family, PrivateProperty,and the State: The social institutionsunderwhichpeople of a definitehistoricalepoch and of a definite country live are conditioned by both kinds of production:by the stage of developmentof labour, on the one hand, and of the family, on the other. The whole thing might appear sad were we to accept Anderson as the spokesmanof histmat. He concludes with recommendationsfor the future of histmat study. Four topics require research: 1) the political structure of socialist democracy, 2) the pattern of an advanced socialist economy, 3) international relations of unevenly developed socialist countries, and 4) the 'means for abolishing class and gender inequalities.' One would have confidencein suchresearchif his were a methodologyof knowingthe apple that depended on biting the apple. Confidencecould be conferreddid he place first, as the solution of all other problems,the living, actualstruggle against inequality. Revolution comes from that. That is 'the traditional project of historicalmaterialism.'To Anderson however, it is little more than 'the socio-cultural patternof "libertarian levelling."' Somethingto be seen, to be taken into account,to be acknowledged,as a matterof research and of planning. Anderson is a man fond of speakingof the laws of history, the laws of money, and, in this volume, he even speaks of the laws of meaning.What are they, Anderson, these laws of meaning? Can we learn them from Samuel Beckett, Tillie Olsen, Allen Ginsberg, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Aime Cesaire, or Ntozake Shange?If we obey them, can we be warm at night,can we anticipatea good meal next week, will the landlordrepairthe roof, can we have some long weekends, can our childrengrow up without heroin, can we take this job and shove it? Capitalhas alwaysneeded a long view to find its laws. It has always had its historical materialists,from Fergusonand Robertsonin the 18th centuryto FerdinandBraudelin the 20th. To make and to enforce the laws of history, the laws of money, and the laws of meaning, it has needed its high justiciaries,its DAs, and its screws. Atlanta, the nationaldetention center of the Cubanrefugees. Atlanta,

146

Journal HistoryWorkshop

and murdersof Black children. the place of the winter'80-'81 kidnappings Atlanta, fourthin numberof crimesamongone hundredU.S. cities. Third, in violent crimes, fourth in homicides. Second, in rapes. Our Boeing has passedthe city the cries of whose unwedmothershave been representedin the searing, ravishingrhythmsof Ntozake Shange. The Boeing begins its descent into New Orleans. It is still 21 February1985. The lady folds up The WallStreetJournal.The fat man closes the book on God. The banker puts away the Ford biography. The professor puts In the Tracks of next to his conference papers. The cabbie taking HistoricalMaterialism him to his resting place served from 1974 to 1981 on Death Row at the Angola Penitentiary.The flight is over: back to earth: down to business. Anderson will be useful. But, it is Malcolmwhom I remember,the New on the pavementin front cop givinghim mouth-to-mouth York undercover of the Audubon Ballroom. Malcolmsaid of capitalismand revolution, It is impossiblefor a chickento producea duck egg, even though they both belong to the same family of fowl, so-calledfowl. A chickenjust doesn't have it withinits systemto producea duck egg. It can't do it. It can only produce according to what that particular system was constructedto produce. Who could possiblyexpect Perry Anderson to producea duck egg?