Not Yet, No Longer, Not Yet:
An Introduction

Francis Mulhern

In the late 1960s, New Left Review began to develop the interview form as an integral element of its publishing repertoire. The first in the sequence was with Georg Lukács, in the last months of 1968—though not the first published, as it happened, given the delicacy of his situation in Hungary at that time. The first interviews to appear were with Noam Chomsky and Jean-Paul Sartre, pre-eminent figures in their respective fields of linguistics and philosophy, and exemplars, in their contrasting styles, of independent intellectual engagement on the Left.1 Over the next three years, another five interviews appeared, including those with Jiri Pelikan and Hedda Korsch, and, after the unavoidable delay, the record of the conversation with Lukács. This concentrated burst of activity established the interview form as an important one for NLR, and indeed for its subjects. Sartre republished his interview in a volume of his Situations;2 that with Lucio Colletti proved a landmark in the growth of interest in his work; another NLR interview project, expanding by magnitudes, eventually appeared as a full-length book, Raymond Williams’s Politics and Letters.3 Today, a decade past the millennium year, the Review has published nearly one hundred interviews, many of them commissioned and carried out by members of the editorial board, and it is from among these latter that the contents of this collection have mostly been taken.4

The great advantages of the interview are its manoeuvrability and range. Beginning, usually, in a conversation and resulting in a printed representation of that, its production process is more complex than this suggests, combining the greater spontaneity and pace of speech with the greater scope and control available to both parties in written revision and supplementation, where in fact much of the work of composition may occur. A singular form only in the minimal sense in which the novel can be said to be one, the interview accommodates a whole array of spoken and written varieties at both poles of the exchange (exposition and narrative, and elicitation, but also argumentative rallies, interjections, anecdotes, asides) and licenses elliptical transitions from one topic to another—jump-cutting—in relative freedom from the constraints of the standard article form. At other times, it may serve the purposes of what might have been an article, creating a monologic argument or narrative with a facilitating second voice, in effect. Some of the interviews reprinted here move at this end of the range, offering extended and methodical historical treatments of their material. But even in those cases, the differences are palpable. For the interview as conceived of here is among other things a kind of portraiture, or rather self-portraiture—and a mode in which, then, however discreetly, thought becomes thinking, something of its character as a process is reanimated, as concepts find their forms and effects in the grain of biographical sequences and historical construction is re-inflected in the lived interpretations of memoir. Even at its most austerely conceptual or political, and in so far as it goes beyond the merest formal simulation of spoken exchange, the interview takes on the distinctive colorations of autobiography and memoir. The temporal complexity of these interviews brings a further enrichment of meaning. Each, read alone, is straightforward enough: a specific mix of recollection, statement and expectation framed at a point in time. Read as a confluence of voices, in the order suggested here, their suggestions multiply, often movingly and not least ironically. Shared chronological time is criss-crossed by individual histories, one account varying from other accounts of the same thing, the anticipations of earlier generations sometimes coexisting awkwardly with the retrospects of the younger—and both now exposed, after a greater or lesser lapse of years, to readers who, for now, have the privilege of final retrospect. Impersonal cruces in politics and theory are not rendered less objective or less demanding in this process; the fact of ‘complexity’ is not an exemption from judgement, and the personal is not a solvent of public contradiction. But they are heard differently, echoing as moments in a collective historical experience.

The sixteen individuals who speak in these interviews do so from distinct generations of the Left, and out of distinct lineages of thought and practice. Lukács and Karl and Hedda Korsch grew up in the Europe of the belle époque, and were among the founding generation in their respective Communist Parties, in Hungary and Germany. They participated in the revolutionary upheavals at the end of the First World War, both Karl Korsch and Lukács holding office in Communist governments, and all three fell foul of Comintern orthodoxy in the following years. For a much younger group, the Second World War, its preludes and outcomes, were the critical common reference point. Jiri Pelikan (Czechoslovakia), Dorothy Thompson (Britain), Luciana Castellina and Lucio Colletti (both Italy) joined their respective Communist parties between 1939 and 1950, in the years of Stalin’s dominion over the official Communist movement; Ernest Mandel (Belgium) and Adolfo Gilly (Argentina) entered the Trotskyist Fourth International, one just before the war, the other not long after. Pelikan and Mandel were both Resistance fighters; Thompson volunteered for labour service in Yugloslavia after Liberation. K. Damodaran (India) shares features of both groups, and by age stands halfway between them, twenty years younger or older than the others when he co-founded the Communist Party in Kerala in the later 1930s.

Noam Chomsky (United States), by contrast, belongs by age but not politico-intellectual formation: his lineage, as he says himself, is Marxist-anarchist, and he also belongs to the tradition of the franc tireur, the intellectual who intervenes on his own recognizance, without benefit or constraint of party, in the struggles of the time. In this, his peers are Sartre (France)—who, along with Damodaran, a near contemporary in years, is a generational anomaly here—and David Harvey (Britain), who like Giovanni Arrighi (Italy), an intercontinental franc tireur in a different style, was born significantly later, in the middle 1930s. For this transgenerational group, the medium of association with the Left is Marxism rather than communism. Then, after a gap of twenty years, there follows another generational cluster, this one born in the 1950s and shaped in the later decades of the twentieth century. João Pedro Stédile (Brazil), Asada Akira (Japan) and Wang Hui (China) have operated in dramatically contrasting situations and equally distinct roles. The denominators they share today are in one sense or another negative: capital everywhere unbound, in a time when the historic Communist alternative has either spent itself or metamorphosed into its programmatic antithesis, as the herald of a new era of capitalism.

The interwoven circumstances of these sixteen lives make a compelling group portrait. It is a gathering of intellectuals of different kinds, a majority with significant experience of academic work. Most of them are trained specialists, though in fields that readily lend themselves to discourse of the most general significance (language, literature, philosophy, social theory); some are generalists in their parties or movements, as organizers, leaders and writers. The varying relationship between intellectual and political commitments as it appears here will not gratify received prejudices concerning either professorial socialism or the spiritual costs of partisanship. Academic commitments are not always as secure or as much prized as might be expected; episodes of clandestinity, imprisonment, deportation and exile occur more often than many readers will have guessed, and sometimes with compensating intellectual and political gains, also perhaps unexpected. In classic Gramscian terms, they occupy the whole range from ‘traditional’ intellectuals—that is, intellectuals speaking from their distinctive place in the given social relations of culture, responding to an internalized ethical demand with no pre-given political mediation of the ordinary kind—and ‘organic’ intellectuals, that is those who in some sense speak not only for but also from the classes and groups they seek to represent.5

Sartre was the pre-eminent exponent of the first, prophetic mode in his time, and it is telling that his political writings of the 1960s should have included a programmatic plaidoyer for intellectuals as such.6 Just a few years later, in the context of the war in Vietnam, Chomsky published his book on ‘the responsibility of intellectuals’.7 Arrighi and his co-thinkers, at the turn of the seventies, thought to serve militant workers directly, putting specialist knowledge at their disposal in the forum of the Gruppo Gramsci, and for Harvey today, the transmission of critical knowledge from the classroom to the fronts of struggle is direct, an unmediated Marxist theoretical practice in politics. Asada and Wang are similarly engaged, as academics and journalists, in the politics of intellectual life in their respective countries.8

The proper range of the second, ‘organic’ mode remains a matter for debate, but even the strictest accounting will include intellectuals such as Stédile, from a poor farming background and now a key leader of the landless workers’ movement in Brazil. An alternative reading of Gramsci, reopening the conduit from Lenin’s thought, would associate the organic with the idea of the party as collective intellectual, transcending the given cultural division of labour in a continuing effort of political synthesis as the necessary ground of strategy. This is the ideal space of the intellectual as organized militant, the sphere of activity of more than half of the sixteen, in one form or another, and historical experience of it does not favour simple conclusions. The passage from militant/intellectual via ‘leadership’ to bureaucrat is a well-worn narrative topic, and it is then the more worthwhile to pause over the instances of the reverse development, as a career functionary recovers his powers of independent thought and action under the pressure of social crisis, or a intellectual devotee of Stalin makes a calm, critical retrospect, in later life, of the youthful fideist he had been. Reflections such as Damodaran’s on Indian traditions of intellectual leadership, or Asada’s on the charismatic force of suffering in the discourse of Japanese Communism, must complicate all thinking about the formation of authority relations in political organizations. And then there are those cases where the necessarily complex role of party intellectual has been fulfilled without particular drama from beginning to end.

One variety of the crisis of historical communism in the later twentieth century consisted in renunciation of the party-form as such, as a political mediation of social struggles. For Arrighi, the Italian Communist Party and its allied trade unions were not simply to be opposed on their own plane of constitution and practice, but to be superseded by a new kind of proletarian political subject, the self-mediating, ‘autonomous’ worker. In this sense, his intervention as an independent intellectual aimed at a certain realization of the Gramscian idea of the organic intellectual. For Asada and still more for Wang, a post-Communist condition, however defined, is not so much a controversial option as a historical given, whose meaning remains to be resolved. So situated, they complete a historical arc. These sixteen testimonies, ranging across one hundred years, twenty and more countries and five continents, make up a continuous record of Marxist socialism and, above all, of Communism—the International and the informal movement that outlived it, and also the organized revolutionary opposition to its Left—from its emergence in the early twentieth century to its dissolution in the 1990s. Lukács speaks as a party member of more than a half-century’s standing; the Korsches are early casualties of the tightening bonds of intellectual life in the Comintern; Pelikan and Damodaran reconstruct the histories of their respective parties from the eve of the Second World War to the seventies, as Asada will later do for the history and culture of Communism and the New Left in post-war Japan; Colletti and Castellina review forty years of post-war Italian experience; Sartre and Chomsky speak as independents in struggles of the 1960s, at the waning of the old Communist ascendancy over the radical Left; Wang explores the potentials and conundrums of oppositional politics after the historic metamorphosis in China. Cumulatively, they bear critical witness to the history of a movement and thus, in monographic form, to the general history it did so much to define: the mutual ruin of the old empires in the Great War, the Versailles settlements, the Russian Revolution and the rise of fascism; a Second World War, leading to a dramatic extension of the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe and Asia, a new upsurge of anti-colonial revolution beginning with Indian independence and continuing into the 1970s, and the emergence of the United States as hegemon of the capitalist world; the long post-war boom of Western capitalism and its radically ambiguous cultural legacy, the great desublimation that fuelled both the liberationist movements of the 1970s and the neo-liberalism that swept across the planet in the closing decades of the twentieth century; the remaking of the capitalist order, in conditions of globalization and financial crisis. For the Marxist Left and labour movement, the sequence encompasses the disintegration of the Second International in 1914–18 and the foundation of a third, Communist, International amidst a revolutionary wave in Central Europe; the struggle against fascism, coinciding in the Soviet Union with the consolidation of party dictatorship under Stalin, Trotsky’s expulsion and the eventual formation of the Fourth International; the Second World War, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the Red Army’s decisive role in the Nazi defeat and the creation of Communist regimes from the Baltic to the Adriatic, with autonomous revolutions in Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Korea; Indian independence and the progressive dismantling of the European colonial empires; the crisis of Stalinism, with workers’ revolts throughout the Eastern bloc, Khrushchev’s post-mortem denunciation of Stalin’s rule, then the Red Army’s invasion of Hungary; the haemorrhage from the Western Communist parties after 1956 and the emergence of New Left currents in the West; revolution in Cuba; the Sino–Soviet split, polarizing much of the Communist world; the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact military intervention; the great opening of ‘1968’, with the USA on the defensive in South-East Asia and under siege from anti-war movements at home, in Europe and Japan; working-class insurgency in France, Italy and elsewhere in Europe; the rise of the new social movements, above all women’s liberation; the collapse of the Southern European dictatorships and revolution in Portugal; the military coup in Chile and the spread of reactionary dictatorships throughout South America; the rise and early deflation of Eurocommunism; perestroika in Russia and the movement towards the revolutions of 1989; the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc and the Communist movement; the continuing pulse of resistance to capital, its social crises and its wars, and the tantalizing prospects for ‘a movement of movements’ as capitalism attains its farthest reach across the earth.

Lukács grew to adulthood in a world without communist parties or early expectations of socialist revolutions—a world, as he would later say, held in the space of the No Longer and the Not Yet. The world of recent times is in important ways not so dissimilar, but with the weighty difference of an intervening century of experience including both the parties and the revolutions, and the myriad struggles in and around, for and against them. It is as if Lukács’s temporal figure had been reversed and the overarching story of the Left in the past hundred years were one of a journey from Not Yet to No Longer. But that would be premature as a last word. Today, struggles against capital continue in every part of the world, sustained not least by the demonic energy of capital itself, as it pursues self-increase, and by the violence by which its geopolitical conditions of existence are defended. These struggles are multiform, and the debates they foster—over agencies and means, conditions and goals—have few precedents on the Left in their freedom from inhibition. In this too, we are perhaps closer to 1910 than to 1948 or 1974.

Among the participants in these debates are the inheritors of the various traditions of Marxism and communism in the past century, and it would be as rash to discount the bodies of thought and practical experience they bring as it would be obtuse to expect historical privilege for them. Lukács, after years of circumspection, reasserts the classic revolutionary theme of workers democracy. Gilly, a Trotskyist with a long history of work with popular movements in Latin America, ponders the springs of desire in popular struggles and the customary genealogies that channel them; while Stédile, reflecting on the experience of the landless workers movement in Brazil, calls for the renewal of classical emphases on education, ‘a theoretical training for activism’. Wang asks whether the designation ‘New Left’ is appropriate for the positions he defends in what is a categorically new historical situation for anti-capitalist politics; while Arrighi, after a magisterial da capo of capitalist eras and forms of proletarianization ranging over centuries and continents, wonders whether it is not time to find a new designation for the achievable good society beyond capitalism. These are not the signs of exhaustion. What time is it?9 No Longer, yes, and still Not Yet.