Very interested to see what you comrades think. Found it thanks to Noah from Blowback, currently reading RN. I’ll probably edit this and my hexbear /c/theory posts with thoughts once I’m done.

Edited with some notes:

Edited with some reading notes. Starting with Anderson on Nationalism:

Two peculiarities defined it as a political idea, long before it spread triumphantly to the rest of the world. On the one hand, it produced very few significant or original thinkers, with an occasional rare exception like Fichte. As an articulated doctrine, it was incomparably poorer and thinner than its two coevals. On the other hand, just because of its relative conceptual emptiness, it was eminently plastic, and could enter into a great variety of combinations either with capitalism or with socialism—producing both the chauvinism that fuelled the inter-imperialist war of 1914, and fascism which unleashed its sequel in 1939, on the one side, and the revolutionary movements of national liberation in the Third World, on the other.

It seems that nationalism is a vibe more than a coherent ideology (earlier, Anderson compares the theorization of Marxism in the 19th century and the lack of theory for Capitalism).

Not loving the “crimes” of the Soviet state aspect (though obviously there are areas we can and should critique the historical choices they made), but I guess this is for a western audience.

I think there’s a very interesting question about teleology in Marxist theory he’s getting at here:

With this, the enormous political success of Marxism seemed to be the best refutation of its theoretical presuppositions. Far from superstructures following the determination of economic infrastructures—ideal systems reflecting material practices—the ideology of Marxism–Leninism, in more or less Stalinized form, appeared to be capable of generating, in settings without capitalism, societies beyond it.

So, on the one hand, the Soviets did manage to skip Capitalist stages of development – what remains to ask though is can Capitalism be dialectically transformed into socialism/communism like Marx thought?

I think this is a really good insight from Anderson on the historicity of “ideas” in the 20th century:

What was the place of ideas on the other side of the struggle? The ideological deficit of capitalism as a declared order was never really remedied in its battle against communism. The term itself continued to belong essentially to the enemy, as a weapon against the system rather than its own self-description. At mid-century, however, the onset of the Cold War, spelling all-out struggle between two antagonistic blocs, required an ideological gearing-up of capital to a quite new level of efficacy and intensity. The result was the standard Western conversion of the terms of the conflict: not capitalism versus socialism, but democracy against totalitarianism, the Free World against that of 1984.

The “democracy” shit really is the slight of hand that was made. Rather than defend capitalism (the mode and relations of production and class), the West shifted the conversation to “democracy” and thus did not have to justify the horrors of its own system. The elision of responsibility in “democracy” also allows for Capitalism to remain “innocent” of its crimes (no one is responsible).

What do we think of this materialist analysis?

Yet the central reason for the triumph of capitalism over communism lay closer to home, in the magnetism of far higher levels of material consumption, which in the end drew not just the deprived masses but the bureaucratic elites of the Soviet bloc—the privileged as much as, perhaps more than, the impoverished—irresistibly into the orbit of the West. Putting it simply, the comparative advantage of the Free World that settled the outcome of the conflict lay in the domain of shopping rather than voting

And after the jump:

The end of the Cold War brought an entirely new configuration. For the first time in history, capitalism proclaimed itself as such, in an ideology that announced the arrival of an endpoint in social development, with the construction of an ideal order based on free markets, beyond which no substantial improvement can be imagined. Such is the core message of neoliberalism, the hegemonic belief system that has ruled the globe for close to half a century. Its origins lie in the immediate post-war era.

Is Neoliberalism really “Capitalism proclaiming itself as such”? I feel like even at the end of history, “Capitalism” is (to borrow a deconstructivist term) under erasure – it vanishes into the background and avoids the agency/responsibility that a government in a socialist state takes. However, I’d love some thoughts from comrades on this – anyone read Fukuyama (I’ll admit I have not) or any of those liberal demons?

However, I think this is a very good read of the 90’s, historically

The test of a true hegemony—as opposed to a mere domination—is its ability to shape the ideas and actions, not so much of its avowed champions, as of its nominal adversaries. Ostensibly, the regimes of Clinton and Blair, of Schröder and D’Alema, not to speak of Cardoso and de la Rúa, came to power repudiating the hard doctrines of accumulation and inequality that reigned in the 80s. In practice, they typically preserved or extended them.

Similarly, this scans well in terms of the foreign policy of the 90s:

Alongside them came the second major development of the time: the crusade for human rights led by the United States and the European Union. For not all interventionism was frowned on by the neoliberal order. Though the economic sort—if redistributive—was reproved, the military kind was practised and applauded as never before. If the Gulf War, manifestly fought to secure the oil interests of the West, still belonged to an older pattern, its sequels set new parameters. The blockade of Iraq, with a steep intensification of bombing raids by Clinton and Blair, was a purely punitive ‘humanitarian’ enterprise. The unleashing of full-scale war in the Balkans with an aerial blitz on Yugoslavia no longer needed the United Nations even as a fig-leaf for nato action, until after the event. In the name of human rights, international law was unilaterally redefined to override the sovereignty of any smaller state that incurred the displeasure of Washington or Brussels.

OK, now Anderson is really cooking - I like this argument for the role of “liberalism” in neoliberalism:

The reasons for its strength are not to be found in its economic sway alone. For beneath neoliberalism lies a much older set of ideas and values that came to acquire the term liberal in the nineteenth century, and the relationship between the two is one of the most central, yet least discussed issues raised by the dominance of the first. At its core, contemporary neoliberalism is essentially an economic doctrine, whereas liberalism proper was a set of political doctrines that first took systematic shape as a self-declared outlook not in Britain but in France, in the thinking of Constant, Guizot and Royer-Collard, before it generated economic theorems in the work of Bastiat.

What follows is a short review of the historical events the modified liberalism over the 18th and 19th centuries – it’s a really nice parallelism (i.e. the growth of the proletarian laboring class required expansion of suffrage).

To these political systems the masses in the West became attached, if in practice more for the civil liberties they assured than for the popular self-determination they advertised, providing a sturdy sociological foundation for the official claim that this was the Free World, and anything else was despotism.

I do think this is an interesting read – goes a long way to explain the poor family in West Virginia absurdly connected to “America” even as the country decimates their life because there’s a kind of psychic attachment to the “freedom” that America preaches.

However, I think this is where we really get into the dialectical shift (aufhebung perhaps?) between liberalism and neoliberalism:

Neoliberalism was an inherently thinner body of thought, with less popular appeal, than liberalism in its classical sense. Not unlike capitalism itself, of which it was the most radical expression and theorization, it was consequently a term which its most adroit exponents preferred to disavow, as if it were a slander invented by malcontents.

I think that this gets back to the disavowal that Capitalism practices – the theorists of neoliberalism are ashamed of their own work.

Why then, if its doctrines are thinner and its criers fewer, has neoliberalism become so much more powerful and pervasive an ideology than the liberalism on which it rests?

Separating the question – here’s Anderson’s answer:

The answer, familiar to any Marxist, is that the material infrastructure of any developed society is what all the rest depends upon—without it there can be no bureaucracy, no army, no assembly, no media, no hospitals or schools, no prisons, no high or low culture: everything requires a functioning economy to operate. So where not wanted, liberal constitutions or parliaments, liberal newspapers or podcasts, liberal arts or beliefs, can be dispensed with, as a working economic system cannot. That is the sine qua non of any political or cultural order. To which the central claim of neoliberalism adds that only one now exists—‘There Is No Alternative’, in Thatcher’s irremediable dictum. Positive approval of its principles as desirable is not required: negative resignation to them as inevitable will do. Not by accident, the first radical—and for a long time successful—implementation of a neoliberal programme by any government came under Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship in Latin America.

I think the conclusion here is intriguing:

What are the lessons of this history for the Left? First and foremost, that ideas count in the balance of political action and the outcome of historical change. In all three of the great cases of modern ideological impact, the pattern was the same. Enlightenment, Marxism, Neoliberalism: in each case a system of ideas was developed, to a high degree of sophistication, in conditions of initial isolation from, and tension with, the surrounding political environment—with little or no hope of immediate influence. It was only when a major objective crisis, for which it was in no way responsible, broke out, that subjective intellectual resources, gradually accumulating in the margins of becalmed conditions, suddenly acquired overwhelming force as mobilizing ideologies with a direct grip on the course of events.

Is Anderson here speaking of the emergent? The thing that presages the new mode of production? After all, no mode of production is total – there’s always residual and emergent modes (and ideologies). Is the task of the Left to begin to create a system of ideas for a mode of production that does not exist yet?

Today we are still in a situation where a single dominant ideology rules the greater part of the world. Resistance and dissent are far from dead, but they continue to lack systematic, uncompromising articulation. None will come, experience suggests, from feeble adjustment or euphemistic accommodation to the existing order of things. What is needed instead, and will not arrive overnight, is an entirely different spirit—an unflinching and where necessary caustic analysis of the world as it is, without concession to the arrogant claims of the Right, the conformist myths of the Centre, or the bien-pensant pieties of too much of what passes for the Left. Ideas incapable of shocking the world are incapable of shaking it.