Notes on the Anderson-Thompson debates

Perry Anderson’s ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’

[Page references refer to the essay as it appears in English Questions Verso, 1992]

17 - 18 England experienced the first, most mediated and least pure bourgeois revolution of any major European country during the Civil War of 1640 - 9

20-1 England experienced the first industrial revolution in a period of counter-revolutionary war, producing the earliest proletariat when socialist theory was underdeveloped and an industrial bourgeoisie skewed towards the aristocracy.

Agrarian capitalism provided the economic and human surplus for industrailisation, depopulating the countryside to provide investment and labour for the towns.

Mercantile imperialism, the cotton industry dominating Asia, Africa and Latin America provided markets and raw materials.

This industrial capitalist class was based in the Manchester and the North but it skewed aristocratically, a bias consolidated in the aftermath of the French revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.

It secured incorporation into the political system by forcing an extension of the franchise while excluding the proletariat in the Reform bill of 1832.

Its last victory, from Anderson’s point of view was the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, in a bid to roll back cereal protection which rebounded to the benefit of landowners at its expense, limiting the markets for manufactures at home and abroad.

23 Anderson argues the English working class achieved no victories, provoking a massacre when it attempted to organise the first national political campaign of the post-war period in 1819.

In the late twenties and early thirties it produced in Owenism the first mass socialist movement of the century, which was crushed, followed by Chartism.

Anderson attributes this to its prematurity; at the high point of its insurgency a scientific theory of capitalism and socialism was unavailable.

25 By the end of the nineteenth century the British Empire had established the largest empire in history. British society fundamentally acclimatised to imperialism, with Conservatives, Liberals and Fabians all pro-imperial in outlook.

Anderson argues that the British working class benefitted only indirectly from differences in productivity between Britain and overseas and emigration was a more important safety-valve than imperial super-profits; the primary impact of Empire on the English working class was ideological

[cf. Smith on why this is wrong]

27 England emerged from two world wars undefeated, its social structure untouched by external shocks, unlike the European powers. European war actually defused a period of domestic political conflict.

30 The extent of ruling-class hegemony over the British proletariat is historically unprecedented.

32 The most significant ideology of the industrial bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century is utilitarianism; a militant creed of capital accumulation and cultural nihilism. It never achieved hegemonic status.

Anderson also mentions philanthropic liberalism.

E.P. Thompson’s ‘The Peculiarities of the English’

[Page references refer to the essay as it appears in The Poverty of Theory & Other Essays Merlin Press, 1978]

37 - 8 Anderson argues that Anderson is, in line with orthodox Marxism, uncritically adopting an ideal model of working class experience and social development inherited from the French revolution.

Some of the particularities of the English conjunctureL

i) the industrial bourgeoisie in England failed to reshape ruling institutions in its own image; the aristocracy remained a senior partner

ii) the bourgeoisie never developed a totalising worldview making do with empiricism iii) a premature bourgeoisie produced a premature working class; without a totalising theory of its own it could not bring its struggles to a successful conclusion.

40 Thompson argues that Anderson is incorrect in regarding agrarian capitalists as feudal or semi-feudal rather than a capitalist class proper, which from Thompson’s perspective, they very much were.

41 Capitalist development in the countryside, e.g. the production of wool for markets in London, pre-dates the point at which the revolution as a political process began to get underway by about a century and this is itself part of an even longer process which Thompson traces back to the twelfth century.

42 In short Anderson’s account is simplistic, this rural agrarian class was not backward but pro-active in shaping institutions of state, such as the church and parliament.

44 Naturalistic political economy may have been an article of faith for the industrial bourgeoisie but as a doctrine laissez-faire begins with this agricultural capitalist class. This is where Adam Smith derives his doctrine from. They had significant amounts of experience in disciplining their labour force and were central to purging the countryside and its superstructure of regnant Christian notions of moral law, duty, paternality, etc.

47 Thompson argues against the notion of a classic model of social development at all and draws attention to more recent research which also interrogates the purity of the French Revolution as an authentic industrial bourgeois experience.

48 This terminates in a reduction of political phenomena to their mere class content and evacuates a lot of specificity, complexity.

53 Argues Anderson over-states the aristocratic character of the British capitalist class, both historically and in the present.

61 - 3 Makes the case for the English intellectual tradition on the basis of Charles Darwin’s scientific discoveries and objects to the idea that empiricism is an ideology as opposed to a method.

Perry Anderson’s Arguments within English Marxism

[Page references refer to the Verso 1980 edition]

[Anderson refers throughout to ‘The Poverty of Theory’, an essay Thompson wrote which critiques the philosophy of Louis Althusser. It’s a great essay but his critique is, in essence, analogous his critique of Anderson and in many ways is a proxy attack on Anderson and the NLR so I don’t provide any notes taken from it here]

Chapter 1: Historiography

7 Anderson begins by conceding that Thompson was right about Althusser’s epistemology being circular, that his historical work was useless, that scientific theories can define and produce their own legitimacy by themselves regardless of facts or evidence.

8 - 11 Anderson charges Thompson with a lack of interest in Marxian historiography and theories of history, which is inadequate as:

‘far from being especially laible to a schedule of unduly static concepts, as Thompson contends, Marxism preeminently possesses concepts that both theorise and the possibilities and limits of historical change as such (contradiction), and explore the dynamic of particular processes of development themselves’

12 In rejecting a science of history in favour of the provisionality, selectivity and falsifiability of historical research Thompson misunderstood scientific inquiry.

Chapter 2: Agency

18 Thompson’s dependence on the notions of agency and experience are simplistic; the terms move between autonomous prime mover or mere instrument.

25 In doing so Thompson disarms himself to understanding determined social phenomena; events in which agency does not arise.

37 - 45 Thompson under-states the extent to which the British working class had been captured by a spirit of counter-revolutionary nationalism, docile reformism and economism.

46 He also overstates Owen’s influence, insisting that though sections of the English working class may have been revolutionary they were not socialists - rather Republicans or constitutionalist reformists - and by the time socialism did become a broadly accepted doctrine the revolutionary moment had passed.

Chapter 3: Marxism

60 By his own admission Thompson prefers the early Marx of The German Ideology, The Communist Manifesto and the Paris Manuscripts, regarding him as having been hypnotised by the static, ahistorical and unproductively law-bound categories of political economy in Capital.

68 This led him to focus on abstract models of modes of production rather than historical actuality, which is where the Althusserian tradition derives from.

69 - 71 Anderson makes the point that Althusser and those who have taken up his work since have conducted work in economics, politics, culture, the state etc., and also makes the point that Althusser’s account of bourgeois law aligns very closely with Thompson’s.

73 - 5 Anderson completely repudiates Thompson’s condemnation of Althusser’s division of society into separate strata on the basis that it violates the irreducibility of human experience: historical temporality obviously varies by place, time, social development and says Thompson is on much firmer ground when he accuses Althusser failed to synthesise these moments after he had divided them up.

78 Provides Raymond Williams’ concept of over-determination as ‘setting of limits’ or ’exerting of pressures’ as the best use of the term, over Thompson’s caricature of ‘control’.

Chapter 4: Stalinism

*100 - 1 * Anderson challenges Thompson’s account of the history of Marxist thought, which Thompson critiques as ideologically given over, at varying stages throughout the twentieth century to notions of evolutionism, voluntarism and structuralism, making the point that Thompson is lumping together a lot of traditions and thinkers which were at odds with each other.

108 And also goes after those Marxists Thompson praises as useless rightist pseuds.