Summary: Perry Anderson, ‘Ukania Perpetua?’, New Left Review, 2020. Intro to Chapter 3
In Ukania Perpetua?, Anderson evaluates the analytic weaknesses and successes of the New Left Review’s political commentary over the last five decades through the prism of interlocking twenty-first century crises in British society. Throughout, he revisits his own 1964 NLR article ‘The Origins of the Present Crisis’ We asked whether his original thesis held up to historical realities, its relevance today, and whether Anderson accurately assesses the validity of his own 1964 predictions.
Anderson’s 1964 article delineated the long durée of the British state. Here, Anderson was attempting to rectify what he perceived to be strategic and theoretical weaknesses in the British left at the time. Anderson’s narrative of labour and elite formations from the seventeenth century onwards emphasises Britain’s uniqueness from the rest of the continent. This uniqueness lies in the absence of a bourgeois revolution; something he claimed that the left overlooks at its peril.
This long-range narrative is recapitulated in Ukania Perpetua?, conferring the Corbyn defeat with an air of inevitability. Anderson implicitly locates left Labour’s historical inability to capture state power in the party’s structural defects that were locked in by the defeat of Chartism and the absorption of the British labour movement into parliament. The early collapse of popular labour also precluded an indigenous British Marxism. This had detrimental effects in the intellectual sphere, precluding systematic analyses of British society as a whole organism. At the same time, the bourgeois, far from agents of revolution, were incorporated into the aristocratic elite.
Closer in time, the left’s blindness to growing popular individualism in the sixties (a major omission he acknowledges in his own 1964 work) left it vulnerable to right-wing manoeuvres.[1] Changes to the condition of the working class was channelled by Thatcher, whose sovereign individual has become scaled up to the sovereign nation in right populism. Despite it being an obvious corollary of Anderson’s historical narrative, he argues that the persistence of liberalism in British political life since the nineteenth-century was sorely under-estimated.
Nationalism ties together the lengthy essay and it dominated our discussion. Anderson analyses its ambivalence as revolutionary strategy and questions its usefulness as a methodological approach, particularly considering the transnational market and media forces that have grown over the decades between the 1964 essay and now. Our discussion was much more critical of the NLR’s national focus, one which Anderson largely re-affirms in his latest essay.[2] Scottish nationalism for example features heavily in his rendering of British political history but many of our participants contested the prominence it is given. Though Anderson’s methodological insularity is tempered by references to the concept of eversion, the internationalisation of British finance since the eighties, all participants agreed that the concept simply failed to capture just how far capital has become unmoored from the nation-state altogether.
Questions around nation and nationhood is the lifeblood of the essay in other respects. The piece dialogues with two (largely conservative) preoccupations in post-war British historiography: national decline and post-imperialism. Contra David Edgerton, Anderson accepts the premise that Britain has indeed crept down the ranks of the international order since 1945. This assumption guides his central question throughout: why has the continued weakness of the British state neither been pushed to its breaking point nor properly stabilised through a solid programme of bourgeois reform?
Anderson’s focus on British decline, coupled with his overriding focus on party history, betrays a staunchly top-down perspective. If Ukania Perpetua? writes from the shadow cast by the Labour left’s failure to take power, it is perhaps this tendency to abstraction that explains why NLR’s intellectual project never became the political force it set out to be. Anderson continual references other outlets that featured earlier analyses of key cultural developments that now seem essential to understanding 2019 suggests that Anderson himself would concede as much.
[1] Perry Anderson,’ Ukania perpetua’, New Left Review, 125 157
[2] Perry Anderson, ‘Ukania perpetua’, New Left Review, 125, 60
