EDWARD Thompson is Britain's foremost Marxist historian. Author of 'The Making of the English Working Class', 'William Morris — Romantic to Revolutionary' and numerous other works, he is one of the veterans of the 'old new left'.
They were the generation of left wingers who split with the Communist Party at the time of the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and began to elaborate independent anti-Stalinist, anti-capitalist positions.
Thompson's 'The Poverty of Theory', published last year, attacked many of the ideas about Marxism fashionable on the left. This week sees the publication of a rejoinder, 'Arguments Within English Marxism' (NLB, £3.95), by Perry Anderson, who took over from Thompson as editor of 'New Left Review' in the early '60s.
PHIL HEARSE argues that Anderson's book is one of the most important works on Marxism to be published for years.
THE publication of Perry Anderson's new book Arguments within English Marxism is an event of major importance for the British left. Anderson's book is a polemic against Edward Thompson's influential text The Poverty of Theory, published last year.
Thompson's book was itself an attack on 'Althusserian Marxism' and what Thompson regards as the intrusion of 'structuralist', 'dogmatic' thought in British Marxism. The debate which Anderson takes up with Thompson ranges over a wide range of questions, including the nature of historical method, Marxism and philosophy.
In part, it is a continuation of a debate which was initiated between them 15 years ago on the nature of the bourgeois revolution in Britain, and the extent and character of the Marxist tradition in Britain.
All this may seem very abtruse. But the debate is an extremely important one, not just because of the influence of Thompson's broadside against Althusser, but also because the stakes of this debate are ultimately political.
In The Poverty of Theory Edward Thompson declares 'war' against Althusser's Marxism and 'all such Marxisms'. In reality, his 'war' turns out not to be just against Althusser and his familiar system of concepts, but a defence of empiricism against the fundamental categories of Marxist theory.
It challenges 'vulgar determinism', but it is also opposed to the very notion of Marxism as any form of socio-economic determinism. Politically it goes beyond rejecting Stalinism to dispensing with revolutionary Marxism, too.
Science
Edward Thompson savages Althusser's theory of scientific knowledge, which he argues is incapable of understanding history. According to Althusser, scientific knowledge is derived from the application of Generalities II (G2 — scientific theories) to Generalities I (GI — the 'raw material', the object of knowledge) to produce Generalities III (G3 — new knowledge).
Thompson correctly points out that because of Althusser's insistence on the differences between the 'real concrete' and the 'concrete in thought', Althusser's epistemology runs the risk of circularity. The production of knowledge takes place entirely in thought, without the possibility of verification in the real world.
There are evident parallels with Kant, and a radical difference between Althusser's account and that of Marx in the Grundrisse. Yet Thompson counterposes to this an entirely untenable account of how to understand history.
Thompson recommends the 'reality rule' of Hexter — that historians should back the case which seems most realistic in terms of the evidence. The nature of these terms is completely unelaborated.
Empiricism
Thompson retreats into empiricism, refusing to elaborate the categories needed to interrogate evidence, historical or otherwise, to produce scientific knowledge. But the necessity of elaborating a system of concepts to order knowledge is a sine qua non of all scientific procedure, not just an Althusserian whim.
No wonder then that Thompson so radically rejects the elaboration of Marxist categories undertaken by Althusser and his principal collaborators, some of which — the distinction between mode of production and social formation, over-determination, structure in dominance — have passed into common usage.
Class
Perry Anderson challenges the definition of class given by Thompson. Thompson polemicises against Althusser's insistence that class relations are objective structures, and that individual subjects are just the 'bearers' or supports of these objective class structures. Althusser's notion is aimed at Lukacs' concept of class consciousness and the 'class for itself'.
For Thompson the anti-humanist content of the Althusserian position is stark. If humanity is reduced to being the 'bearers' of social relations, then what role exists for conscious human action? Thompson replies that class is not an objective structure, but a process of common identity:
'Classes arise because men and women, in determinative productive relations, identify their antagonistic interests, and come to value and think and struggle in class ways: thus the process of class formation is a process of self-making, although under conditions which are "given".'
An even more extreme (and influential) statement of this position is to be found in The Making of the English Working Class. Anderson points out that such a definition is a break with the Marxist notion that class position is not determined by consciousness.
On the contrary, throughout history numerous classes have not developed any sense of class solidarity or consciousness. Marxism would therefore find it impossible to make any objective analysis of class relations without reference to consciousness, which itself, in Thompson's account, becomes the key determinant of class.
Thompson's explanation of class gives an insight into his whole account of the corpus of Marxist concepts. He argues that Marx started out trying to achieve a 'unitary theory of society'. But he became obsessed with the narrow concerns of political economy, leading to a false economic determinism and the infamous 'base/superstructure' model.
According to Thompson, this privileges the economic and is precisely not a 'unitary theory of society' — in which culture and value systems play their proper part — but a false theory of 'economic man'. This account is not at all an original one, but shares much in common with many forms of 'anti-determinist Marxism'.
The typical failure of this account is its inability to grasp the importance for Marxism of the concept of the social relations of production as the determining level of social reality. Marxism is a determinism. But all Marx's 'economic' categories turn out to be social relations, not objects or structures.
It is precisely for this reason that all the accusations about Marxism being a technological or narrowly 'economic' determinism are so wide of the mark.
In his The Poverty of Theory Thompson attempted to give a social account of Althusser's theories. Althusser was the last systemiser of Stalinist thought. His epigones in the universities and polytechnics were 'lumpen bourgeois' divorced from practice.
Much of the responsibility for introducing this dogmatic clericy was given to New Left Review and to New Left Books who were charged with 'an insistent pressure to re-assert Marxism as as doctrine'. On behalf of the 'old new left', the generation of '56, Thompson made a damning judgement of the group around Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn and Quintin Hoare, who took over NLR in the early '60s.
Rebuff
Anderson delivers a blistering rebuff to this series of accusations. Having defended Althusser's project of elaborating the categories of Marxism, although not all his conclusions, Anderson rigorously demonstrates Althusser's personal distance from the Stalinist apparatuses.
He rightly demonstrates the scope of the contribution — we would say an historic contribution — made by the NLR team in introducing a wide variety of European Marxist thought, previously unknown in Britain, thus making a crucial contribution to broadening the scope of Marxist culture in this country.
The debate between Anderson and Thompson finally resolves at the political level — around Stalinism, Trotskyism and revolution.
The political period to which Thompson makes constant nostalgic reference is that of the anti-fascist Popular Front and the period of national unity against the Nazis. While breaking with the Communist Party, Thompson never fundamentally broke with the strategy of the 'British Road' — of peaceful, democratic advance.
All his references to Trotskyism are of a derogatory nature, treating it as a subvariant of Stalinism, another arid and dogmatic clericy.
Anderson gives an account of the political formation of the core of the NLR team. Unlike the 'old new left', its first major political intervention was not the neutralist Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but the militant anti-imperialist Vietnam Solidarity Campaign.
Strategy
Inevitably they were forced to confront the political ideas of Trotskyism, and the history of the Communist movement, which the old new left never really did.
Thus it was forced into a political confrontation with the peaceful road strategy, and towards an elaboration of the revolutionary strategy of Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Gramsci.
A brief review of this character can hardly summarise adequately the full scope and depth of the debate that has been set in train, and which has hardly been concluded.
Thompson's The Poverty of Theory reverberated around the academic left, apparently carrying all before it. Anderson has done the whole of the socialist movement a service in taking this debate so explicitly and rigorously to its political conclusions.
The debate is not over; Perry Anderson makes clear that he regards his conclusions as provisional and subject to rectification. But it is a debate which transverses all the fundamental issues of Marxism in our time. It deserves the attention of every socialist.