Conversations with History: Perry Anderson

[Music] welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is Perry Anderson who is professor of history and sociology at UCLA he's the author of numerous publications including passages from antiquity to feudalism lien ages of the absolute state considerations on Western Marxism in the tracks of historical materialism English questions and a zone of engagement he's the editor of the new left review and is the 2001 Sandford SL Berg lecturer at Berkeley very welcome to Berkeley must be you where were you born and raised well by accident I was born in London but logically I was conceived in China so I should have been born in in in China my father spent virtually all his adult life as a customs official in China and my brother was born there and so my first very early infancy was actually spent in in China but then the family was actually on my father was only in California in 1941 and while we were here Pearl Harbor occurred and the Japanese took over the International Settlement in Shanghai which was the headquarters and some of the Chinese imperial maritime customs so from that point of view we obviously couldn't go back and so my father spent the rest of the war working for military intelligence mm-hmm here in San Francisco actually in some west of the time so my first experience and sort of school and life was actually in the States and how in retrospect do you think your parents effect shaped your character that's a very interesting question which I find it slightly difficult to answer because my father died when I was at the age of seven and I only really discovered discovered so to speak his full life career and character and soul in doing historical research about him in the 1990s and so in that way but it was a very cosmopolitan household I suppose that would be the decisive thing after the American experience family went back to Ireland and then I said school in England and then you know we were sent abroad and so a lot and so on during the holidays from very early agents and I put a sense of the importance of other cultures or the nations and this is a Globus global perspective is something that you carry forward in all of your work I'm curious what what in in going back and researching about your father many years later was there any interesting understanding that emerged from that exercise well of course I taught me a great deal about interwar China and it taught me a great deal about the the foreign role wasn't of course just a British role or an American role the Imperial maritime customs actually had Russians Germans Japanese it was a real international consortium almost managing basically Chinese tax affairs for the Chinese government staffed and so on by these foreigners so it were very fascinating and unusual organization so obviously I became deeply absorbed in learning about that and in the course of that in reading my father's confidential dispatches and so on to headquarters I learned an enormous about about his about his character and and person he was a I think an extraordinary brave and straight forward and at the same time unorthodox a human being and I formed this entirely anonymous retrospective admiration for him and some other very moving for me actually to somehow discover one's parent and so on after 40 years of it after their death and so on in the archives ah what about books did you read a lot as a young person oh very much so yes and the pre television in Ireland there was nothing to do during the vacations except read so we and my brother we just reread a sort of eight hours a day basic in any books stand out from your youth that really impressed you and put you on the intellectual path that you took a read history from very early on actually and was extremely fascinated by it and so on from so if you all suddenly say well what in your teens for example what made the most impression well I think I would say maybe Gibbons decline and fall of the Roman Empire and how old were you when you read that just I would dance in a good point I suppose I was about 1415 maybe something like that I think it can be said of you that in some place in some ways you're in your work you're not at home in any particular place but you're some in some way the world is your home were there any other influences from this early period that we've actually touched on a number that gave you this global perspective this broad and I I would also want to put it in there I wouldn't want to give as it were too bland an account of what it's like growing up if you're not as it were fixed in one place so one thing that certainly made an impression on me was the following when I was a kid here in boarding school los gatos Oh in California in California oh gee oh yeah um one was our you know obviously I had a in English accent a small child sort of my brother and so we were picked out not exactly targeted but you know the mixture of kind of derision and and you know which small children is an outsider and although he treated us by the time I got to back to England immediately after the war we had American accent so we were treated as Americans and American American kids also objects to some extent of fun or of attacking zone then getting back to Ireland we treated English and the Irish didn't like the English right I just say have that and then finally came back to England gained by which time you know we were treated as Irish so that process sort of unsettles and so on as it were what you could say is one I think of as a unreflective or automatic attachments and so on to you know to one's own country so a sense of living with a strange Minh is that is that fair Clara Clara a plurality of existence of this plurality of different cultures yeah now and then where were you where were you educated you went back to Ireland but then yeah but then we are sent to boarding schools in in in England and so on good very good schools I would say I was very I was very happy in them and a good teaching was absolutely excellent and as well as happens very often I think the teachers you have in this period of life in some ways make more of an impression than the teachers one gets actually at University I think that's a very common experience certainly at any rate in boarding schools I think it is and along the way you're acquiring a facility with a lot of languages or did that come later you speak how many now well no actually how you touch me on on a sore spot I come from a family in which were my brother elder brother Benedict you know he's fluent in the Thai Javanese Tagalog Indonesian not to speak of being a first class class assist which he was originally in my younger sister works for Amnesty International is fluent in Albanian Greeks ever Crichton or whispered so I'm the laggard very much in the family I can read a number of European languages but my spoken ability is far below that of my siblings so but I can obviously the main European languages I can you know make my way in uncensor and where did you do your higher education at Oxford at Oxford and and let's let's let's talk now about your that period when you're at Oxford I mean this would be in what years 56:59 yeah now these were really intellectually very exciting time tell us a little about that period for for somebody who at some point along the way really takes a DES chol on the world well ice came up was we sailing into Oxford in September or October no September yeah 1956 and within three weeks the Soviet invasion of Hungary had occurred which was of course an enormous international event and so on which sure we're you know came as a tremendous as it were shot was a great cause and so on hunger and revolution and his suppression and so on by Russian tanks and troops and at the same time simultaneously at the very same time was of course the anglo-french Israeli attack on Egypt and so on after NASA had nationalized the Suez Canal and so you had this in no huge international double crisis interconnected in some sense okay and that meant that the entire campus and so on was seething I would say with political argument tension a debate not just on one thing like the Vietnam War but you had these two completely different what was going on in Europe and as it worked that's communism what's the fate of communism and at the same time what's going on in the Middle East that's to do with colonialism imperialism and and and it's sequels it was so it was virtually impossible for any I think lively young person not to be very quickly and deeply politicized by that experience it wasn't a consensual it's not wasn't really like let's say what I think occurred on many US campuses during the Vietnam War where there was a massive pretty unanimous rejection of the war by young people you have to remember that in England in 56 the country was at war with Egypt and large numbers of students and so on in effect bought the government's line NASA that's another Mussolini or another Hitler we are fighting bravely and so on against the dangers of a dictator fascist dictatorship and so on so forth defending freedom which was a complete pack of lies of course but the fact is that it meant that in our colleges there was a very very tense atmosphere I mean between the two camps lessons on who were against the war and those who for the war I mean it's a memorable experience I can remember going into my college I was in one of the two most conservative colleges at Oxford and there about I think about three or four of us only so you went in for supper you know this in the everybody sitting at their benches and you could feel the atmosphere and some of isolation and hostility and so on you were against the wall but everybody else was in favor of it there wasn't true and generally the universities a hollow split more or less equally but in this colleges we were in a very small minority as I as I expose myself to your work I'm struck by attention which is also a strength in your work which is on the one hand a lot of work that one finds in the ivory tower so to speak a very rich deep historical studies on the one hand but also a constant concern with what's happening in the world as you just described in describing your your first days at Oxford help me understand how Theory helps you deal with the enormity of this intellectual task because it is difficult to reconcile the two or is it not well let me go back to the formative period of this period around the late fifties early sixties in England what came out of the crisis and the ferment of late and 56 was of course among other things what came to be known as the New Left which was originally a British of course the America the American spectrum knew left and even in its phrase gone round the world is now very lively Chinese knew left causing difficulties to the authorities there but the Englishman left was really the first one and so and it came out of the idea of a double rejection you're on the new left if you against what the Russians were doing in Hungary and you were against what the European governments not the American Cup in this case but the British and French governments and so on we're doing in Egypt okay and so from the immediate political reaction the need to demonstrate and so on in the streets to take a stand and so on against what our government was doing in in Egypt but also and so on against what the Russians were doing in Hungary out of that it came you know an attempt to understand what is one of the larger structures of the world which if as it were produced these events what kind of left is it that it was actually socialist Prime Minister in in France for example he launched the attack against Social Democratic Prime Minister launched the attack against Egypt and of course it was the Communist tradition Stalinist traditions on which had produced and so on the monstrosity of the suppression Hungarian revolt so that was the background the new British people have defined itself as neither of those two things and in doing so it meant you had to try and think through a series of you know public questions which were also intellectual theoretical questions it was about the history of the left about the history of Empire I mean Soviet empire British Empire and it's about this time that you become part of the new left review is that correct yes very shortly after the new luxury was founded in 1960 the year after I had graduated and I suppose I read my first article 1461 and became editor in 62 from now yeah that's right and in a way this tell us a little about this journal you know in in the context of the history because it became an outlet really for a discussion about what was both happening in the world and how it related to broader sets of theories yes I mean our aim or increasing saw an eye on my immediate cohort took over the review and a couple years after was founded I mean our aim was to produce a journal which had the seriousness capacity to publish something which is a very developed argument which you associate with the journals in the Academy and academic journalism not just journalistic or educational material but at the same time ones that would be free from you know the professional apparatus and so on are the necessarily ivory tower aspects and so on as you put them of any purely scholarly journal so it was an attempt to produce a journal that would be radical and scholarly and at the same time aimed at a at a at a general intellectual public what is it like to edit a journal like that in those times well I short answers it was great fun I mean I have to I have to say of course you know once there's an element in which in your 20s you you don't feel the weight of the world so greatly so there's an element of looking back on it I would say we did things and so on in a kind of irresponsible spirit sometimes because you were carefree and so on but the same time very very passionately engaged in what we were trying to do another feature of the journal I should explain is that we felt strongly English actually anglo-saxon manga American culture was in some way had become in some way very provincial after the war was self-enclosed there was just english-speaking cultural intellectual political references and we thought that was absurd here we were and so in sitting in London and so there's this huge European continent incredibly rich intellectual traditions of its own lots going on politically that was fascinating long histories France Italy Germany Spain so on so forth so you you know we really have to try and as we bring that back into our culture make it actually living set of references on for our generation and so we did a lot that was a very important in terms of the sort of international commitment of the journal its aim this was one of the most important tasks and so we set ourselves and I think we did that relatively well actually and and anything when you became editor again recently you wrote a long essay to finding a new agenda and you you talk about the journal and you say a political German based in London that has tried to treat social and moral Sciences theory if you will and arts and mores culture for short in the same historical spirit as politics itself so it was not just politics I know by no means no no we published articles obviously I'm very pioneering for example modern film studies which we know today and so on I mean the news of you can play a very important role and so on in starting serious study of comparative study of film in the early 60s when my colleague Peter Wallen who's now at UCLA was in a great architect of this in the journal but we published articles on live show we talked about philosophy and you know many many other subjects other than just directly political ones now in terms of your shall I call it your your academic concerns your work throughout your career it really has a comparative historical international view it's breathtaking in its scope if I might say that you you you you you work I think focuses on the importance of history and the longer-term dynamics of social and ideological conflict and so on what what do you see as a guiding theme in in that work I mean in other words obviously you you are a Marxist in your orientation but but how has grappling with these materials both informed your theory and changed your thinking about that theory well let me try to situate what my own writing her Maharaj see my own writing in relationship to the tradition if you like the intellectual tradition out of which it come you mentioned that it was a this was a Marxist tradition England is famous for having had the most gift is extraordinary levy of Marxist historians in particular that's what we would didn't have Marxist philosophers Marxist East additions you know and so forth but we did have these very very great group of Marxist historians edward thompson Eric Hobsbawm Rodney Hilton their many many others ok now that was a very obviously direct influence and as it were model of attraction for young people in my generation now this Marxism really concentrated mostly in - I would say in two areas one of which was traditional economic history after all that's what knocks everybody thought that what is Marxism about it's about economic determinism it's about the way in which and so on the material production of daily life is the foundation and sort of all the other other institutions and ideas in the society you have to look first at the way in which the product if the material products are produced and so Marxist economic history was a very big yield our Marxist historians reacted against this Edward Thompson was the most famous one insisting now Marxism isn't just an economic determinism actually it's an attempt to understand how people live not just from what they live and that means you must look at their culture there are mentalities their outlooks their subjective hopes and dreams and so on ok and so you had a very very rich cultural Marxism in which look to you know the customs of people the way people lived and saw the way they constructed and so on there did their private lives also as well so those are the two strands which form the intermediate intellectual background against which I grew up cultural the cultural and the economic my own temperament of by temperament I suppose it wasn't really is such a conscious choice but my intemperate mental preference was for politics in a somewhat more traditional sense that's the Eifel well what Marxists were not very good at was actually discussing political life itself not as it were the culture as such not the economy but the history of the state and also the history of the ideas and so on political ideas and so those are the two areas of it I felt and so on were were a bit missing and so that's what I attempted fundamentally I would say that if you ask me what's the emphasis and some of your work I would say that it's really the transformations of political authority state structures on the one hand trying to view it in a broad international comparative way and on the other hand what are the Attic where great moments adventures and misadventures of political I different bodies of political ideas and so what you accompanied and so on these historical transformations one of your mentors I guess intellectually was Isaac joy sure yeah and you in an introduction to a set of his papers wrote that he had serene political fortitude a spiritual independence characterized his work and that his his the universality of what he wrote was was given by literary power so so in a way is it fair to say that those are virtues that that in a way have to characterize this kind of theorizing can can we extend your description of him to the way you think about what you do yourself well I wouldn't they these are tons of praise for an eye for a great historian I wouldn't ascribe them to myself and so on I mean that would be a vain and foolish thing to do but I think they represent very very strong values at any rate to which one should be attached and should try to do a spa there's some temperamental element here again I see you know it takes all sorts to make a world that's a kind of phrase which traditional phrase that retains a lot of validity there are historians who I mean edward thompson is a case in point whom I had many debates with and when he was alive I you couldn't characterize his temperament as serene at all it was in extraordinarily in a way excited passionate and turbulent but he was a very good sir that's another another kind of way of relating and so on to the drama's and difficulties of one's own time now in one of your essays I think it was in a series of lectures you gave it a vine on on the tracks of historical materialism you're talking about Marxist theory and you say the trajectory of the theory has thus always been primarily determined by the fate of that practice any report on the Marxism of the past decade I think you're you're talking about the 70s here will in evalee then be the first instance of political history of its external environment and then you go on to say that Marxism has always been you know self-critical and and learning from what was happening in the world has to or should inform the theory let's talk a little about that say it's always but I hope I didn't say it's always been so clear as it should always be shadowed it's okay hey you're very tall orders in which has been yeah yeah right sorry - statement so so let's bring that perspective to talking about where we are today you know in looking you know at the world and and one one of the the things that's you know quite apparent is really the decline of the left I know you wrote an introduction for a collection of essays on the state of the left you know in the night let's talk a little about that what what what happened there why was there has it been this decline well it's a it's a very large subject you could say were these different strands of what very useless peeking could be called the left there was the attempt by the the Communist tradition let's call it that and so on which was a revolutionary tradition attempting to overthrow capitalist States and so on by if necessary armed struggle not not not absolutely necessary but normally and so on that was the conception then there was the much more moderate social democratic tradition of gradual reform in the richer countries and so on the communist movement was really strong in the poorer European countries and in Asia the reformist social democratic tradition was strong in the richer countries and then you had also of course what has to be associated with the left which is the anti-colonial movements which you know will not add the social democratic or communist very often and so on but they could see themselves movements of popular National Liberation and some they were extremely hostile to the existing as it were world you know the order of world capital so your question really is about what happened to these three it's a it's a differentiated picture I suppose you would have to say but this the simple answer if you want a really simple answer is this all of these traditions greatly underestimated and so on the internal strength of capitalism as a socio-economic system and so it's capacity and so on for self adaptation for continual adjustment the extraordinary resources of productivity and so on which spring from its reliance on competition as a central mechanism of economic life this was on the under and greatly underestimated I believe in sanh in all of these traditions and that if you wanted to have one single reason putting it very very simply now as to why the left today and so on is so much weaker than it was fifty years ago I would say that it it underestimated its adversary mmm-hmm and you actually say wrote recently in your inaugural essay of for your new editor you returned to the editorship you say whatever limitations persist to its practice neoliberalism is a set of principle rules undivided across the globe the most successful ideology in world history virtually the entire horizon of reference in which the generation of the 60s grew up has been wiped away the landmarks of reformist and revolutionary socialism in equal measure yeah many people have said oh now well that's going too far it there may be an element of exaggeration possibly in the last remark as far as the first remark is concerned this is the thing I often as it were encounters very strong objections well no neoliberalism is much more partial is a doctrine it's not really really says successful and so why should you say that but actually I think it is it it has a universality as a chord in the doctrine of as it were the pure free market and its virtues that really does go beyond even traditional world religions were never really world religions they were actually regional religions all of them without exceptions when never really global in that sense neoliberalism today you can find adepts of in a hard neoliberal doctrines in official and governing positions virtually in every corner of the planet and so on including and so on I mean you can go to Beijing and you will find in some people swearing by Friedrich von Hayek or Milton Friedman justice really as you will and so on in Buenos Aires or in shall we say Frankfurt or in San Francisco or Chicago now now you you in I think it's in the zone of engagement in your concluding essay there where you're reviewing of fukuyama's work you you you offer a look into possible future contradictions in a system and at one point you say the sources of socialism is it was traditionally conceived have not so simply dried up and then you go on to say for the central case against capitalism today is the combination of ecological crisis and social polarization it is reading explain what you meant by that well social polarization if you look at any of the big un regular Rio UN reports you see that wealth today is more concentrated more staggeringly concentrated on a planetary scale I mean the top as it were 20 individuals richest individuals now and so on in the in the world have at their disposal resources and far larger than a good good many states and so on of those is a staggering concentration of wealth of the top of us of the as it were the global ladder and at the bottom you have a incredible pit of misery famine and misery in very large areas of the world and this is not a substantially improved at all so on over the over the past you know twenty thirty twenty thirty years Africa of course is the most you know catastrophic region in this letter respect and so on but it's also the case and so on if you look in some large parts of India and some Latin America and so forth so social polarization is really you know something actually that many liberals or conservatives will concede and so on say this is regretable and so on but it still existence on as for ecological disaster I mean it is very very clear that you know you this is basically now a kind of common sense in a way that global warming is as it was still preceding that if the entire view and you have to ask yourself what would happen in some of the entire population of India and China you know had a two-car garages and you know was living at the technological and economic standards that the American middle-class is today and so on the planet would become very rapidly uninhabitable now one of the concerns that in yours albergue lecture yesterday that you were expressing was and I may be reading into what you said but I will give you my reaction is that one of our current malaise a--'s in a way is that internationalism which we've talked about as being a guiding theme in in the way you've looked at problems is is really in a way the the the perspective of international capitalism where as the the the opposition the protest tends not to have the same capacity to think and act globally it helped me restate what you said and if you could help us understand that better that would be well I think for at least for a century between shall we say the 1840s and the 1940s the capacity to transcend one's own there were national limitations and national interests for a much wider set of interests until as it were translate this transcendence into actually organized actions that belong on the whole to the labor movement and to the left didn't belong and so on to as it were businessmen capitalists and so on mothers since the 1950s that has I think you know very dramatically changed I mean we have seen in the post-war order are a high degree of coordination the ability to take a kind of as a work a more than national viewpoint on the interests of the system for the interest of the system on the part of war you know is it worthy let's say on the part of the over privileged whereas those who are less privileged to become more and more confined to a local regional and at best in national frameworks of action but that's partly to do with the destruction and some of the traditions of the Communist international and the withering away of many of the traditions of the alternative socialist international as well you write in that esday the distances between a Korean seamstress Zambian field hand Lebanese bank clerk Filipino sailor Italian secretary Russian miner Japanese auto worker are vastly greater than those that were once bridged in the ranks of a unitary second international even though not a few might even be the employees of the same conglomerate yeah I mean I think the original labor movements derived their strengths partly from the fact that they were white male you know working classes and so on which concentrated in a few kinds of fundamental industries engineering mines and so forth today of course capitalism is an infinitely much more larger more ramified system on a world scale it has many grated types of employment its geographical span is immensely faster so you have a huge dispersal and so on in effect and sort of those who work for capital labor capital growth capital itself and soul has acquired more and more means and so on a bit of coordination and sort of of its activities on a world scale so where might we look or might a theory look to find some sort of oppositional strength to these forces of capitalism well we already see the beginnings and son of a very strong potential popular reaction in the anti-globalization movement it's not a very happy term the anti-globalization wind as such and so more globalization itself is a bit of a euphemism but it's clear that the actions in Seattle in Prague in Quebec Mach the probable beginnings and so on of something like a an attempt very conscious tent by young people by trade unionists and so on by concerned citizens and so in many parts of the world to come together to try and as it were stem and so on the uncontrolled operations of of capital now do we have a set of theories on the left yet that address these sets of problems that the define a map in a way that some conservative thinkers are beginning to do or have done well it does if you let's take the anti-globalization movement you do have attempts to theorize this on now my own view is that they may be a bit premature because movement is only really as it works like scarcely more than a year a couple years old and so on it's very unlikely anyone would come up with a very satisfactory conceptual framework for a movement whose future we can't yet fully discern I think I would say so that it's very understandable when people would want to try and generate a big theory out of that but it may be a little bit early on the other hand in terms of the intellectual resources of the left I mean it's a point I often maiden would repeat there's plenty in the locker in a certain sense today if let me just save simply what is the single if you like most widely-read work in the world about the history of the 20th century and so it's actually Eric Hobsbawm so you know what work the age of extremes had translated and I do know how many languages and so on as it were more than 20 languages and this is a work of a Marxist destroying really reflecting on this whole history of the 20th century okay if we want what is the most serious attempt to understand what's happened in the world economy from 1945 to the present you don't look turned to economists and so on who didn't think very historically you turn to a Marxist historian like my colleague Robert Brenner at UCLA's work and so is the fundamental contribution to understand it to unpacking and some very complicated history of actually what's happened from 45 to the present if you want to understand the cultural tone and temper of the times and also a great deal of what we could say is the lived experience at least in the France capitalist countries of the period from the mid seventies to the present Reid is not just on the Left we'll turn more and more to the work of Frederick Jameson and so on who's work on as it were post modernity and the postmodern is the central body of work on this field if you want to turn to questions of ecology and environmental disaster and these questions it's the work of you again people from a Marxist tradition like Mike Davis's recent book run so on the late Victorian Holocaust and so on is a masterpiece and so on which is showing the interrelations and so on the Train if you like Natural History and social history so I think you one has and so on a very rich repertoire if you like your intellectual resources and so on on the on Lefton it's that identic that all in the decline of the left is a political organizational decline curiously enough in this period intellectually the left is quite stupid I think pretty vibrant now what with these intellectual resources in hand can we look at any of the phenomena in the world today as a source of effective political action in the future you've talked about the the anti-globalization movement what about the women's movement well this is a very interesting Lee if one had to say well what has for the point of view of anyone on the Left what are the best things that's happened in the world the good things that's happened in the last 20 30 years it's certainly the case that the we the women's movement is often a slightly misleading term because you could speak of women's emancipation women's liberation I prefer that because very often the kinds of liberation and emancipation it is brought about have been molecular they don't they're not necessarily the result of an organized movement in the sense of the labor movement the movement with a you know an apparatus an organization institutions continuity the women's movement is a much larger cultural and social sea change and it's an enormous change obviously it's a great great step forward for equality I mean in just a historically it's you know that's such an obvious point now having said that it's not clear at all and this is a matter which I think many people answered about how far the equalization relation change sexes has consequences for the social and economic structures as a whole how far in capitalism simply quite happily live with that and so on I mean without really as it were changing its ways in any other is the Equality exactly yeah the Equality of the sexes you could have equality the sexes in great social inequality as well as we have social inequality has not declined at all in the United States in the last 25 years basically since the late Carter days inequality has increased in the United States very steadily even under President Clinton it actually and so on if you look at the real indices and so on over wealth disposable wealth you will see that inequality is actually increased even have a period and some of the publican presidencies in the 80s so social inequality has greatly increased but at the same time gender equality has also increased so the two things gender equality has created quality as it has increased so this is a kind of conundrum on switch I don't know that anybody really expected conservatives thought I know well you're going to level all social difference if you allowance on equality between the sexes people on the Left thought well if you have sexual equality that must and so on as it were generate greater degrees of social inequality equality but so far the you know the evidence isn't all in but so far this looks as if and so on these two things can coexist greater sexual equality and greater social inequality what about the potential of the ecological movement as being a source of revolutionary potential well I would say that so far there was one we were we may be in a kind of trough of the minute the initial impetus of the ecological movement was extremely radical and it had a kind of revolution certainly a revolutionary potential for changing the coordinates of the society then typically in the 90s above all I believe the green as it were movement became more and more institutionalized some extent co-opted and so on into the existing structures particularly the particularly evident in Europe and so on where green parties when they finally entered government behave not very differently from as it were a rather traditional very unexcited as it were standard model green parties on the other hand I think this has read a lot of discontent among younger activists and so and therefore I think that the potential for a radical ecological movement remains and so I'm very very big and it's also just simply the case the dangers are getting worse and worse I mean I it would be crazy and so on to discount or minimize the emancipating potential in effect until of ecological activism what should we make of the relationship of this phenomena of globalization and its relation to American power in the world is is globalization merely a manifestation of American power well I think I put it like this a Adorno and Horkheimer once had this as it were wrote this famous phrase he does not wish to speak capitalism should be silent about anti-semitism I believe that's actually a false proposition in some ways it's too drastic plenty of anti-semitism that's nothing to do with capitalism but I think you can say that he who does not want to speak about America should be silent about globalization the two things and so on are very very closely interlinked very closely interlinked the global culture what is in the global culture that is not American culture one life will you is a very legitimate question and it's not clear on what the what the answer to that all the global institutions which have been set up in the bubble in the 80s and 90s are ones which are at American behest essentially and so on I mean we can see this again if we look at the International Monetary Fund the Bank of International Settlements the UN Security Council all of these we see again and again that the United States is able more or less unilaterally and so on to compel these international institutions to do what is in effect a national a national will it's not a dict art directly because actually most other governments really cooperate and some wish to wish to cooperate but this is an American undoubtedly in American audits America Pax Americana of a kind that even the most ambitious of the generation of for example Dean Acheson I think never really imagined one of the points you make in in your most recent long essay in the new left for review was a commitment to to look at the major changes in culture and you've just suggested that many of them emanate from the United States you speak of the massive displacement of dominance from verbal to visual codes you talk about the way the market absorbs deviance in a in a youth culture and finally the the voltage connecting high and low systems have been shortened talk a little about that the the the the contours of what we have to look at there and it's its power to contribute to the success of both capitalism and American power well it's connected with something that I talked about elsewhere which is what I would call the plebeian ization of the culture traditionally our Western cultures had in the early parts of the 20th century is right through actually until I would say around the turn of the 60s 70s two very distinct levels there was high culture which was the preserve of as it work underprivileged elites basically highly educated elites on the one hand and then there was a kind of verb a rather or what was definitely a second-rate commercial mass culture and so on for ordinary people who didn't have the same privileges that was roughly speaking the split-level structure okay it meant it had two aspects of this on the one hand the high culture remained if you like pretty uncontaminated and so on as it were by the commercial imperatives of the market and on the other hand it meant that the commercial culture often had a kind of had to appeal to large very large numbers of people so it had a kind of naive freshness to it often and so on which you can see if you look at Hollywood movies in the in the interwar period right up through the 40's and so on there not knowing actually and so on in some ways and so there's a there's a sense of tapping into what we're as if there were very strong spontaneous primal dreams and aspirations and hopes fantasies also and sort of ordinary people okay I think that that division is broken down very very greatly in the last 20 years and what you get is a kind of intermingling of the two which most of whose effects I think are it most busuu short-run effects are pretty negative on the whole so that the mass culture is far more knowing today than it was before so it's kind of a second orders much more directly manipulative I think and so it borrows elements to some extent from the high culture and the high culture has also been dragged relentlessly into the vortex of the market through a whole series of you know essentially Kim commercial commercial rewards and and and Aunt Edie's mints and and pressures and you can see this and so on right through the structure of publishing and so on the structure of the film industry structure of the music industry all of this and so on as I think in some it's it's II see what you now have is a much more system is leveled in which in a certain sense there aren't any longer these as it the hierarchy in the system and so on has as it were eroded so you can say it's more yet egalitarian I think it genuinely is much more egalitarian but it's a kind of a in some ways officiated egalitarianism and so on in which you have quantities as we're winning out have a quality and so on a very big scale and we will cost to innovation to to break through thinking very much so what would you advise students about how they should prepare for the future because clearly is as one listens to you talk about your life there there there is an emphasis on on a global perspective there is a an emphasis on steeping oneself in an intellectual tradition and history of how concretely my students learn from your insights and experience and apply them to their own life do you think well I think that they're I suppose I would say two principle things the first is that to acquire a sense of the world in which you live you really do need to be extremely curious about the past and not necessarily just the immediate past but the remote past this is a very very future-oriented culture we live in today and so that can can blind you with swords it's it's a present it's a present issed culture but as it were with a leaning strong leaning to thinking simply about the future that is a form of blindness and so on so you it to orient yourself in the world as a young person so on its I think there's no other way than steeping oneself to the maximum extent possible and so on in the accumulated previous perience of other as it were generations which are available fundamentally in books of course and so that's that still the primary way of as they were acquiring a knowledge of that it's not the exclusive knowledge because now we have all kinds of other visual aids and so forth which are very important but that's the first thing is as it were you have to be able to look back as well as for it in order to be able to look forward intelligently you need to have a strong sense and so on a WaterGuard earlier and then the second thing is it which is of course particularly I suppose important in the United States which is a kind of entire universe to itself and so on a huge continent very large numbers of Americans and young Americans have never traveled abroad at all that's much more difficult to do if you're perched on the edge of Europe in England or something like that your bundle list and so on to have a sense of these other cultures but I do think there that the experience like as it were of simply of not just travel as a tourist and so on but a living abroad as it were the immersing yourself in some other culture is is absolutely decisive and so on you can't you can't really be a phrase which is often used in some cities in the world without some some element of that one final question have you maintained an optimism about the future given the theories that have guided your perspective on the world and the present state of the world I never really use the terms optimist optimism or pessimism I don't think that I mean about myself unlike there are many people who became radicalized in the 1960s but I would say 5 10 years younger than myself and my contemporaries who had incredibly high hopes that the entire world would be changed some through the turmoil of the late 60s and the early 70s and so on when that didn't happen they were completely crushed they're utterly disappointed and they became I'm had a passive or very pessimistic and so I think that was a very world phenomenon very broad broad phenomena I never felt this because I came to I suppose you might say political conscious some historical consciousness in a period in which the established order if you like was very very strong you never felt and so on as it were that it was going to be a sort of sort of you know overthrowing overnight or changed and so on radically you were aware if you were thinking about long run history but big historical change is taken over a long time to work them way they work their way through so the fact and so on that the left you know was pretty very strong actually internationally and so on between the 50s and 70s and then has been very weak since then I mean it's just as it were part of the flow of the outflow of the time I wouldn't it's never really as it were intimidated or kind of discouraged me I was I wouldn't say I was pessimistic then-justice I wouldn't have said if you'd said me in the in the late sixties well you know look at all this is going on around the world and so on who knows up surges insurgencies everywhere are you very optimistic I would've been rather caution said well no it's great what's happening now but you know it may not last you have to we have to wait and see what the next turn of the wheel will will bring so in a way that brings us to a third point about advising students and that is always maintain a dose of realism absolutely in what you're doing yeah absolutely is professor Anderson thank you very much for taking your time to be here today and to give yesterday the albergue lecture thank you and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history [Music]

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 62,761

Rating: 4.9209876 out of 5

Keywords: Marxism, new, left, New, Left, Review

Id: jjTKsRfVM9Q

Length: 58min 10sec (3490 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2008