Preface

This book, the first of two collections to be published at Haymarket in 2014–15, consists of essays published between 1999 and 2013, presented in order of appearance.* Although all have different origins, they share a common approach, as each assesses the work of an important thinker on the political left. Most of these figures are associated with Marxism, a tradition that two (Alasdair MacIntyre and Tom Nairn) eventually abandoned and to which one (Benedict Anderson) has always maintained a certain ambivalence. The only complete exceptions are the writers who lie at opposite ends of the historical period traversed here. The most chronologically distant is Adam Smith, whose death in 1790 predated the emergence of Marxism by over fifty years, although he had an important influence upon it as one of the masters of political economy, a discipline rightly considered one of what Lenin called the three “sources and component parts” of historical materialism.1 The most recent is Naomi Klein, who more than any other participant articulated the views of the alter-globalization movement that coalesced around the Battle of Seattle in late 1999, above all in her books No Logo (2000) and The Shock Doctrine (2007), the latter of which is reviewed below. These two individuals suggest some of the problems involved in the concept of the Marxist tradition. In the case of the first, the problem is whether Marxism is simply an extension of the Enlightenment thought represented by Smith, as the late Eric Hobsbawm tended to argue.2 In the case of the second, it is the relationship to historical materialism of the kind of anticorporate radicalism represented by Klein, which is not necessarily hostile to Marxism, but rejects it—and indeed all alternative doctrines—as a theoretical basis for the movement while displaying deep hostility to Marxist revolutionary organizations.3

By chance rather than design I have approached representatives of the classical Marxist tradition discussed here in slightly oblique ways. I trace the development of the concept of progress (and related notions such as “advanced” and “backward”) in the thought of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels through the prism of their changing attitude toward the Scottish Highlands. I explore Leon Trotsky’s life and legacy through an examination of the image of him presented in Deutscher’s magisterial, but subtly misleading, biography. Antonio Gramsci’s work has been contested perhaps even more strongly than Trotsky’s, not least because his prison notebooks have provided such a fruitful basis for multiple conflicting interpretations: here I attempt to show how some notable misrepresentations arose by following the process of their reception in Scotland. Finally, I consider the relationship to classical Marxism of Walter Benjamin, a figure who, while sharing many interests with Gramsci, is, unlike him, generally regarded as belonging to the Western Marxist tradition—a categorization that, in part at least, I dispute. The chapters devoted to more recent thinkers are more conventional in form, mainly because the occasions for which they were commissioned or composed—book reviews in all but one case—lent themselves more easily to career overviews.

All of these essays were written in or around the capital of Scotland, the country where I happened to be born but continue to live as a matter of choice. “No one could come away from it without knowing it was written by a Scot,” said Alex Callinicos of my book How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?4 This was certainly my intention, but not one motivated by any nationalist impulses on my part. As will soon become apparent, there are few issues on which I agree with Nairn, but I do identify with one of his statements: “I have never hidden the fact that my own dilemmas and oddities emanate from those of my country, Scotland.”5 I would perhaps put this slightly differently. I have always assumed that a grounding in the local and specific is a necessary precondition for understanding the global and general, and have therefore taken as a starting point for understanding the characteristic features of our epoch the ways in which they have affected Scotland. These features include the consolidation of neoliberalism as the dominant form of capitalist organization, the emergence of secessionist nationalism as a phenomenon of the developed world, and the decline of social democracy as the expression of working-class reformism. It is appropriate, then, that in addition to chapters assessing the impact of the Highlands on the work of Marx and Engels, and the influence of Gramsci’s writings over the Caledonian left, this volume should include discussion of three Scottish thinkers. Two of these are from Fife (Nairn himself from the village of Freuchie and Smith from the nearby metropolis of Kirkcaldy), and one from Glasgow (MacIntyre).

The essays reproduced here differ from the originals in five main ways. First, in keeping with my publisher Haymarket’s location in Chicago, I have rendered the language into North American. This is a painless process that largely involves changing the letter “s” into the letter “z” in certain words, changing the word “which” into the word “that” in certain sentences, and—as in the case of this sentence—adding a comma before the word “and” prior to the last item in a list. I have retained my Scotticisms (of which “outwith” seems to cause particular bewilderment in copy editors). Second, I have made the layout and endnotes stylistically consistent. Third, I have excised references to the publications in which the essays first appeared (of the “as has been argued previously in International Socialism . . .” or “readers of Historical Materialism will be familiar with . . .” type). Fourth, I have removed passages that appeared in more than one essay except for the essay in which they first appeared (or in some cases except from the essay in which they seemed most appropriate) and replaced them with a “see chapter x in this volume” reference. Fifth, I have restored some passages that editors originally omitted, either because they disagreed with them on theoretical grounds or—more usually—because the article would otherwise have simply been too long for the publication concerned. Chapter 13, on Adam Smith, has the majority of these restorations. Excisions on grounds of taste, decency, or to prevent the publishers being bankrupted in a libel court have not, however, been reinserted. I have resisted the temptation to revise texts or add new material; anyone sufficiently motivated to check back against the originals would therefore be able to confirm that previously unpublished additions contain no references that post-date their appearance. Neil Rafeek predeceased the publication of his book, but three of the other authors discussed—Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan, and Neil Smith—have died since I wrote the chapters dealing with their work, the last-named at a tragically early age; nevertheless, here too I have retained the original text in which they appear in the present tense.

Only in the case of chapter 6, on MacIntyre, is the text significantly different from previously published versions. This is a combination of several pieces—or more precisely, a reconstruction of one original piece of research, which I subsequently parceled up into several different chapters and papers. I had been working off and on since 2000 on an edited collection of MacIntyre’s Marxist writings for the Historical Materialism book series. Around 2003 Paul Blackledge, who had independently discovered these works, joined me in the project at the instigation of the series editors, who for some reason suspected that it might otherwise never be completed. Paul has subsequently written extensively on MacIntyre and, while our views are not identical, they are compatible. A few brief passages from our jointly written introduction to Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism, reproduced in this chapter, are actually Paul’s, but it would have been pointless to rewrite sentences with which I was in basic agreement, even if it were possible to disentangle our respective contributions at this late date. I am grateful to him for permission to reprint such passages here.

Any assessment by a Marxist of other Marxists involves a particular standpoint within the tradition. As chapters 11 and 12, which deal with aspects of Stalinist organization and historiography, make clear, my standpoint is that of Trotskyism; but to self-identify in this way still leaves many questions unanswered, given the notoriously fragmented nature of that movement. Chapters 4 and 6 respectively discuss Deutscher and MacIntyre, two figures who, between them, demonstrate how one can arrive at different, not to say diametrically opposed, positions while ostensibly starting from the same body of work. MacIntyre declared that he could no longer consider himself a Trotskyist or indeed a Marxist of any sort by 1968. Deutscher remained faithful to his own conception of Trotskyism until his death the previous year. Yet I would argue that the latter effectively made as decisive a break with Trotsky’s thought as the former, all the more misleading for being unacknowledged. In any event, my sympathies here are with MacIntyre-as-a-Trotskyist, since my own political formation was in the International Socialist (IS) tradition to which he adhered between 1960 and 1968, although in a very different period. I first encountered the IS eight years after MacIntyre’s departure, at the point when the organization was transforming itself into the Socialist Workers Party, through Rock Against Racism and then the Anti-Nazi League, whose great achievements I discuss in chapter 5.

IS was one of the heterodox varieties of Trotskyism that tried to understand the system that emerged from the Second World War in ways that more orthodox variants refused or were unable to. My own adherence to it indicates that I regard it as superior to the other heterodoxies, although it has more in common with them than is often supposed.6 Nevertheless, I do not regard it as complete or self-contained. The late Daniel Bensaïd, always the most unorthodox of the orthodox, wrote:

The alternative to Capital’s barbarism will not take shape without a thoroughgoing balance sheet of the terrible century that has just ended. In this sense, at least, a certain type of Trotskyism—or a certain spirit of Trotskyism in all its variants—is not outmoded. Its instruction-deficient legacy is certainly insufficient; but it is nonetheless necessary for those who wish to unravel the association between Stalinism and communism, to free the living from the weight of the dead, and to turn the page on the disillusions of the past.7

The notion that Trotskyism, even embracing all of its most positive manifestations, is a necessary but insufficient basis for any kind of renewal of Marxism seems incontestable to me. One of Trotsky’s most important achievements, perhaps even more important than his role in the Russian Revolution, was to preserve and pass on the traditions of Bolshevism that made October 1917 possible; but the manner in which revolutionary continuity was maintained engendered its own problems. An understandable interest in the Russian experience as the only socialist revolution in history translated into the assumption that subsequent revolutions would necessarily take the same form, even when many of the conditions that enabled it were becoming increasingly historical in nature. A deserved admiration for the Bolsheviks resulted in the attitude that there was little or nothing to be learned from any other source, even though there were quite fundamental problems—above all the formation and maintenance of reformist consciousness—with which they had not dealt and on which they had little or nothing to say.

I will return to these issues in a forthcoming book; but they have a bearing on the title of this one. It comes from a famous passage in Walter Benjamin’s last and greatest essay, “On the Concept of History”:

Historical materialism wishes to hold fast to that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger. The danger threatens both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it. For both, it is one and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition from the conformism that is working to overwhelm it.8

One of the key words here is “unexpectedly”—the notion that in a crisis we may learn from aspects of tradition that had been ignored, overlooked, or expunged, but that have now acquired a hitherto unanticipated significance. The point is not that contemporary Marxist revolutionaries are in danger of becoming “tools of the ruling class” in the way Benjamin indicates here. He was most likely thinking of the way in which social democracy first colluded in the face of imperialist war and then, along with Stalinism, capitulated in the face of Fascism. The danger we face is quite different, namely of assuming that the tradition is fixed and immutable, providing a set of “lessons” applicable in any situation, no matter how inappropriate, and in that way handing victory to the ruling class by mistaking what is to be done for what was done. If we are to prevent this, the task of “wresting tradition from the conformism threatening to overwhelm it” must be urgently undertaken in the knowledge that—to adapt a metaphor deployed by both Engels and Benjamin—we are passengers on a runaway train who are trying to bring it under our control before disaster occurs.9

 

Neil Davidson

Scotland

July 26, 2013