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Ends in Sight: Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson, Gregory Elliott, London: Pluto Press, 2008.

Abstract Gregory Elliotts Ends in Sight (2008) argues that Marxism is no longer a real movement grounded in the historical tendencies of the present, but has retreated into being a utopian idea. Refusing to embrace anti-Marxism, Elliott controversially argues that such a position is the only realistic one that can be held by the Left in the wake of the defeat of historical socialism. In assessing this claim, this review-essay re-traces Elliotts indebtedness to the work of Perry Anderson, and notes the tension Elliott reproduces from Anderson between resignation to defeat and a realism that would scan for new signs of resistance. Elliotts closing embrace of a full-blown pessimism is criticised as inconsistent with the necessity of some consolatory illusions to any radical political mobilisation. The crucial question that Elliott raises concerns the motivational power of Marxism as a political discourse, particularly once shorn of its grounding in the tide of history. Keywords history, Marxism, Perry Anderson, teleology, Gramsci

The plural ends of Gregory Elliotts title ostensibly refers to the various forms of the endof-history thesis canvassed at the close of the twentieth century by Francis Fukuyama, Eric Hobsbawm, and Perry Anderson. However, there is really only one end in question here: the end of socialism. The large thesis of this brief, unfortunately overpriced, work is that we have witnessed the end of any kind of systematic alternative to capitalism for the foreseeable future. Elliotts provocative contention is that communism can no longer claim to be a real movement grounded in the historical tendencies of capitalism, but, instead, has retreated into being a utopian idea; Marxism has succumbed to Marx and Engelss condemnation of critical-utopian socialism: at best oering valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class, at worst merely painting fantastic pictures of future society.1 The charge of utopianism is, of course, a common trope of anti-Marxism, both right and left. Elliott, however, insists that, rather than abandoning Marxism tout court, or embracing a utopian Marxism in the style of Bloch or Jameson, we must think Marxism in light of its historical weakness and crisis. To summarise Elliotts relation to Marx, we could give the more idiomatic version of his repetition of Domenico Losurdos denition of his relation to Marx: cant live with him, cant live without him (p. xi). The adoption of such an ambivalent and pessimistic position might not appear obvious from Elliotts previous intellectual and political trajectory. He is probably best-known for his work Althusser: The Detour of Theory (originally published in 1987 and reissued in 2006), an intellectual biography characterised by a ne balance of criticism and sympathy towards its subject, especially considering the passions aroused by the Althusserian project, not least in the UK. Elliott has also done continuing and highly-valuable work as a translator, and rightly gained a reputation as an eloquent and acerbic commentator, especially on the French intellectual scene.2 He has always retained an independence of
1. Marx and Engels 2002. 2. See Elliott 2006b.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/146544609X12537556703511

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judgement, and a refusal of the usual see-sawing of enthusiasm followed by renunciation that has often characterised UK left-intellectual engagement with continental Marxist theory. He is, to return a judgement of Elliotts from a review back to sender, an author mercifully free . . . of the phobias and philias about French intellectual life.3

Displacing Marxism The clue to the origin of Ends in Sight, I think, lies in Elliotts intellectual biography of Perry Anderson, Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History,4 to which it might be regarded as a pendant. In the concluding balance-sheet of the biography, Elliott noted Andersons loss of condence in the theory of historical trajectory cornerstone of scientic socialism of which he had been an indefatigable partisan.5 The result was not the abandonment of Marxism by Anderson, but rather its displacement from expressing a movement of social transformation to the explanation and criticism of the existing state of aairs, coupled to a quasi-Pascalian wager on the future abolition of capitalism.6 Elliott nished by expressing qualied admiration for Andersons waiting game. In a strange moment of identication between biographer and subject, Ends in Sight adopts the position Elliott ascribed to Anderson wholesale. The eect of this political identication profoundly shapes Elliotts work, but the permeating inuence does not stop there. Anderson is not merely one of the gures discussed, but primus inter pares, as Andersons own earlier discussions of Fukuyama and Hobsbawm guide Elliotts work.7 There is also a more nebulous stylistic link. The oftremarked Olympian tone of Andersons work, which has attracted so much ire from the Left,8 is given a sharper and more urgent edge in Elliotts writing. A notable stylist in his own right, Elliott combines the combative polemical edge of Andersons early work, which he had commended in Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History,9 with the serene dismissiveness of Andersons more recent surveys of intellectual life. The result, however, is considerably more compressed than Andersons work; indeed, this whole book is probably shorter than Andersons essay on Fukuyama. It consists of a series of proles reworked from articles and papers dating from 19952004, and this perhaps accounts for the occasional repetitions and, more problematically, variations in tone and conclusions. The rst chapter, on Marx, is pivoted around the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto (in 1998), and more particularly the faith that text placed in an historical dialectic that, although proceeding by the bad side, could ground the necessary emergence of the revolutionary proletariat from the internal contradictions of capital. Elliott notes it was this
3. Elliott 2006b, p. 145. 4. Elliott 1998. 5. Elliott 1998, p. 241. 6. Elliott 1998, pp. 2423. 7. Anderson 1992, pp. 279375 and Anderson 2005 respectively. 8. See Linebaugh 1986. 9. Elliott contrasts the habitual iconoclasm of Andersons earlier work with the studied prudence of his later work, concluding the most innovative, original Anderson is the intransigent freelance intellectual; Elliott 1998, p. 109. Elliotts Labourism and the English Genius (1993) might be said to be his own exercise in mimicry of the iconoclasm of the early Anderson.

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faith that was essential to the workers movement of the twentieth century, and he refers to Gramscis remarks on the providential religion of the subaltern (p. 33). For Elliott, it is not possible to simply dismiss or ignore this grounding faith and its mobilising power: the ideological formation that was historical Marxism the ocial party Marxism of the Second, Third and Fourth Internationals alike was no mere betrayal of [Marxs] thought (p. 31). Elliott is keen to stress, against the attempts to recover a pure or true Marxism, that historical teleology remains crucial to Marx (and Marxism). While the Marx of Capital and the Grundrisse would considerably complicate the teleological model of history, not least with his concept of the tendency, as would the critical Marxism of gures such as Lukcs and Althusser, without some historical grounding that can be given or identied, communism risks being merely utopian. The severing of the dialectic between capital and its future gravediggers means, in short, that history is not on our side. The next two chapters, on Fukuyama and Hobsbawm, pursue this theme in a more indirect fashion. In both cases, Elliott is concerned to identify the problem of the collapse of systematic alternatives to liberal capitalism, which he regards, following Anderson,10 as the rational kernel of Fukuyamas thesis (pp. 559). Hobsbawm mitigates this conclusion by a consoling insistence that the self-identied Marxist rgimes, and social democracy, provided a civilising balance to untrammelled capitalism in the twentieth century. For Elliott, such retrospective consolation neglects the internal contradictions of capitalism, minimises the crimes of Stalinism, and, fatally, allows Hobsbawm to leave his enlightenment Marxism intact in spite of the depth of its defeat. And yet, for Elliott, the recognition of the historical defeat and failure of actually-existing socialism and social democracy also entails noting that this has not rebounded to the benet of alternative formulations of socialism and communism. If we cannot console ourselves with the past record, neither can we cheer ourselves up with future hopes; we might again rephrase Elliotts relation to Marx: couldnt live with actually existing socialism, cant live without it.

Realism or resignation? Again it appears that Elliott has adopted the same position he had previously analysed in Anderson, this time of Deutscherite form.11 The Deutscherite position, named after the great historian and biographer (notably of Trotsky) Isaac Deutscher, hoped for reform, either from above or below, of the actually-existing socialist countries and a recognition of their function as a bulwark or, in the language of theology, katechon (restraining force) against capitalism.12 With the dashing of these hopes in 1989, the pessimistic registration of historic defeat might appear as the only option (p. 107). Such a registration is, however, avoided by Elliott through invoking Andersonian lucidity, the lynch-pin of the whole work, and the subject of Chapter Four. The chapter pivots around Andersons editorial for the re-launch of the New Left Review in 2000, Renewals, in which he argued that, in the face of the virtually uncontested

10. Anderson 1992. 11. Deutscherism merits sixteen entries in the index of Elliotts biography; Elliott 1998, p. 324. For Andersons own discussion of Deutscher, see Anderson 1992, pp. 5675. 12. See Davidson 2004 for a critical discussion.

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consolidation of neoliberalism, the Left has tended to adopt one of two positions: accommodation with the existing order, or the consolation of inating the possibilities of opposition.13 In a footnote, Anderson courted a third option resignation, a lucid recognition of the nature and triumph of the system, without either adaptation or selfdeception, but also without any belief in the chance of an alternative to it.14 Even the disavowed notation of such an option in a footnote was enough to attract the usual charges of pessimism.15 Despite his reputation for pessimism, Andersons own preference, at least as regards the NLR, was for the adoption of a stance of uncompromising realism that would refuse both accommodation and the consolation of understating the power of capitalism.16 Elliott sympathetically and convincingly reconstructs this realist position. Instead of drawing on dubious compensations from the past la Hobsbawm, or inating contemporary possibilities, Marxism can nd its place in the unremitting criticism of the present coupled to a scanning for signs of resistance and refoundation.17 Of course, one could dispute whether Anderson meets this standard, and Elliott notes his high-handedness when it comes to analysing instances of resistance; but this necessity to ground Marxism in the conjunctural identication of the tendencies of the present, negative and positive, certainly oers a promising model for left thinking. The diculty with Elliotts reconstruction of realism, however, is how this sits with his prefatory remarks, reiterated in the rst chapter, that socialism is condemned to become utopian once again (p. 25). Such a utopian positioning would seem to leave Marxism, as Marx and Engels indicated, fatally detached from historical conditions, and hence incapable of a realism that could critically assess reality, as we (ideologically) nd it. This selfundercutting of his own proered realism is further undermined by the full-blown pessimism of Elliotts conclusion. Lambasting the limitations of the rebirth of resistance against neoliberal capitalism signalled by the emergence of the Il popolo di Seattle, Elliott can only conclude that no signicant resistance, comparable to historical socialism, is in sight. The result is that he is drawn irresistibly to embracing Andersons option of resignation, in a gesture plus royaliste que le roi. That said, the conclusion is probably the most consistently amusing part of this work, dishing out brickbats with a mordant glee: Hardt and Negri are condemned for a mutant Browderism,18 while Slavoj iek is described as the artisan of a quasi-Third Period Marxism-Lacanism. It would also be dicult to dispute Elliotts verdict that we have yet to see anything like a substantial enough institutional instantiation of the movement of movements that could rival historical socialism. One can share Elliotts frustrations at the bien-pensant platitudes of the radical Left, which risk verbally parlaying real defeats into the

13. Anderson 2000, pp. 1314. 14. Anderson 2000, p. 13, n. 5. 15. For Gilbert Achcar (2000) the editorial embodied an ultra-pessimism, while, for Boris Kagarlitsky (2000), in a more intemperate style, it was a sign of unconditional capitulation. 16. Anderson 2000, p. 14. 17. See Anderson 2007. 18. Earl Russell Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1934 to 1945, and known for his slogan Americanism is Communism. Elliott is mocking Hardt and Negris philo-Americanism, and their faith that capitalism is already embryonic communism simply waiting for the multitude to step into power.

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mirages of future victories. In fact, this might help explain the inconsistency of tone and position noted above. The bitterness of Elliotts conclusion would then be the result of a deliberate choice to bend the stick to a deep pessimism as the means of correcting the tendency to consolatory optimism on the contemporary Left. In true Maoist fashion, it might then be possible to achieve the correct line between these two deviations of the uncompromising realism Elliott elsewhere seems to favour. This may, however, amount to a refusal to take Elliott at his word. If so, then his endorsement of resignation is deeply problematic, and not as coherent as he supposes. What Elliott appears unable to countenance is Andersons suggestion that no one on the Left is immune to consolation, nor can they be since political movements must motivate their adherents during periods of defeat.19 Following Anderson, we might suggest consolation is a necessary illusion for left politics, which precisely must balance itself between a recognition of structural constraints and the recognition of the ability to change those structures. Lacking that moment of change, resignation threatens to tip-over into renegacy, and the puncturing of illusions into the passing of an illusion (to echo Franois Furets adieu to Marxism). This is all the more disappointing as Elliotts careful extrication of Andersons work from such charges promised a powerful re-orientation to a realism that would not neglect the organisational, structural, and agential questions so often elided in invocations of a socialist or communist future. It might also appear that Elliotts condent judgement that there is currently no end in sight for capitalism is vitiated by the nancial crisis that emerged almost in parallel with this work. And yet Elliotts pessimism would still stand because, as he notes: It would be a false consolation (not to say a defective argument) to infer from the existence of capitalist crisis some anti-capitalist resolution of it (p. 56). While there has been a general agreement on the necessity for nancial regime change, 20 and concomitant shifts in political and intellectual rgimes, the nature and form of that change remain as yet undened. To quote Elliott again: The cruces of an alternative agency, organisation, strategy, goal that could command the loyalties and energies of the requisite untold millions await anything approaching resolution (p. 111). It may be that capitalism as we knew it had ended, but whether that truly signals its nal ending (p. 127) is still very much in question. We can choose to chide Elliott for the underestimation of the factor of class-struggle in these internal contradictions of capital, but it would be dicult to refute his thesis regarding the unlikeliness of the resolution of such contradictions in a Marxist, communist, or even social-democratic direction, without the material bases of alternative agency.

The ending of Marxism At issue in Elliotts pessimism is his deliberate choice to conate two ends: the end of historical socialism with the end of Marxism as a scientically- and historically-grounded theory. The collapse of the rst, which is beyond argument, would not seem to necessarily cause the collapse of the second. Elliotts blunt conation, however, makes a more rened point: while he is at pains not to deny the ability of Marxism to analyse the irrationalities
19. Anderson 2000, p. 14. 20. Wade, 2008.

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of capital, his emphasis falls on the seeming inability of this critique to nd material grounding for its alternative socialist or communist vision, without which such visions remain chimeras. In this sense, his diagnosis of Marxism almost exactly conforms to the charge of critical-utopianism levelled by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto. While Marxism may oer the most persuasive diagnosis of capitalism, as the rush to Marx in the current crisis indicates,21 it has been less persuasive in predicting the transition out of capitalism. If the Communist Manifesto could provide ideological fodder for the bourgeois triumphalism of the 1990s, then, no doubt, Capital and the Grundrisse could provide consolation for the current crisis. Lacking the guarantees of scientic socialism, Marxism risks melting into air. Elliotts question to any refoundation or reformulation of Marxism is in what sense would it oer a plausible socialist prescription to complement the diagnosis and prognosis for capitalism (p. 124). Underlying this question, and only implicitly sketched by Elliott, is the question of the motivational power of Marxism as a political discourse: the broken link between Marxism as science and Marxism as practice. The paradox of historical socialism was that, although its condence in the march of history may have been misplaced, it was this condence that led to its material success. Gramsci noted that belief in mechanical determinism, belief that the tide of history is working for me in the long term, was a source of resistance in the face of defeat.22 His conclusion, however, was that this was a weak form of resistance, requiring transformation into the sense of an active will. The diculty Elliott appears to be indicating is that the problematisation of such teleological and providential conceptions and he approvingly refers to Althusser for just such a problematisation (pp. 523) causes a crisis of faith in the ecacy of Marxism. Although, like Gramsci, Elliott dismisses such teleological conceptions, he appears more doubtful about what might take their place. To remain in the religious register, a Pascalian Marxism of the kind suggested by Anderson might, like the Jansenism it borrows from,23 be a Marxism for intellectual lites, unable to reach out to the masses who demand something more than the emptiness of the wager. What is omitted in Elliotts retention of a classical and strict division between scientic and utopian Marxism is the circularity of human practice, in which belief, no matter how false, can make itself true. The tension of Gramscis formulation of the religion of the subaltern, reproduced by Elliott, lies in the way this motivating function is rooted in social practice and retrospectively legitimated by its success. I would agree with Elliotts Althusserian injunction against telling lies, but we could also invoke the Nietzschean commendation of the necessity of falsity to life. In the terms suggested by Anderson we noted above, the necessity of consolation and inated hopes to the success of any resistance is obvious. The problem of a supposedly fully-disabused realism, which lies behind the critiques of Anderson, is that it can slide into a sanctioning of things as they are. It would be fascinating to see Elliott explore this problem further. It is the immense merit of Elliotts work to point to this tension and to challenge the current fashion for the emphasis on the utopian, conjunctural, and contingent. In posing the question, however equivocally, of how we might historically ground the possibility of socialism or communism in the absence of a faith in scientic socialism (or at least in its old
21. See Brown 2009. 22. Gramsci 1971, p. 336. 23. See Goldmann 1964, for a Marxist analysis of Jansenism and Pascal.

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teleological and providential form) Ends in Sight remains vital reading. Admirable in its uncompromising critical verve, if not always consistent or convincing in its conclusions, at its best Ends in Sight makes a powerful case for us to sharpen our thinking and to embrace an uncompromising realism that remains true to the exibility of Marxs own conjunctural thinking. Reviewed by Benjamin Noys Reader in English, University of Chichester b.noys@chi.ac.uk

References
Achcar, Gilbert 2000, The Historical Pessimism of Perry Anderson, International Socialism, 88, available at: <http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj88/achcar.htm> (consulted 23 June 2009). Anderson, Perry 1992, A Zone of Engagement, London: Verso. 2000, Renewals, New Left Review, II, 1: 524. 2005, The Vanquished Left: Eric Hobsbawm (2002), in Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas, London: Verso. 2007, Jottings on the Conjuncture, New Left Review, II, 48: 537. Brown, Ian 2009, The 18th Brumaire of Barack Obama, The Globe and Mail, available at: <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/the-18th-brumaire-of-barack-obama/ article1179757/> (consulted 24 June 2009). Davidson, Neil 2004, The Prophet, his Biographer and the Watchtower, International Socialism, 104, available at: <http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj104/davidson.htm> (consulted 23 June 2009). Elliott, Gregory 1993, Labourism and the English Genius: The Strange Death of Labour England?, London: Verso. 1998, Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2006a, Althusser: The Detour of Theory, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill. 2006b, Parisian Impostures, New Left Review, II, 41: 13945. Goldmann, Lucien 1964, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Penses of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, translated by Philip Thody, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gramsci, Antonio 1971, Selections from Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Georey Nowell Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Kagarlitsky, Boris, 2000, The Suicide of the New Left Review, International Socialism, 88, available at: <http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj88/kagarlitsky.htm> (consulted 23 June 2009). Linebaugh, Peter 1986, In the Flight Path of Perry Anderson, History Workshop Journal, 21: 1416. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 2002 [1848], The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin. Wade, Robert 2008, Financial Regime Change?, New Left Review, II, 53: 521.