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Download Download Buchbesprechungen | 129 hegemony. However, Berg is extremely Sebastian Berg: Intellectual careful in refusing to confront the histori- Radicalism After 1989. Crisis and cal crisis of orthodox Leftist perspectives Re-Orientation in the British and the that he surveys head on. Rather, his prose American Left, Bielefeld: Transkript discloses a deconstructive methodology 2016, 344 S. which, “considering the narrative inten- tion of the texts, it nevertheless reads them with questions in mind that are in many Reviewed by cases dierent from the questions the writ- A. Shahid Stover, New York ers addressed in their articles and from the purposes their texts served” (p. 17). is strategy has the eect, desired or not, of allowing the editorial decisions and theo- As a signicant study and measured in- retical preoccupations of such notable g- tellectual history of Marxist theory and ures like Irving Howe, Paul Sweezy, Perry socialist discourse bleeding out of main- Anderson, and Ralph Miliband to ulti- stream Leftist journals in response to the mately contribute towards a quieting con- geopolitical collapse of the Soviet Union demnation of whatever combined vestiges and the subsequent demise of the Eastern of Marxist theory and socialist democracy Bloc, Intellectual Radicalism After 1989 they still creatively endorsed in the imme- clinically refuses to indulge in any grand diate aftermath of the political dissolution pronouncements akin to Francis Fukuy- of Soviet style nation-state communism in ama’s infamous claim of the ‘end of his- 1989. 1 tory’. Instead, Sebastian Berg exhibits Of key importance to understanding the an analytical temperament of numbing scope of this work is a fundamental para- glacial objectivity as he tediously mines a dox introduced into Leftist thought by vast array of epistemological tensions and the failed project of Soviet communism political apologetics engaged in by the particularly to radical orientations exist- mainstream Left to account for its historic ing in Western Europe and the United failure at consummating and sustaining an States. For as Berg asserts, “this consti- authentic socialist political project within tutes a paradox because Western Marxism Western Europe or the United States. in most of its shades had for a long time To be clear, the value of this work lies not distanced itself from really existing so- in its novelty, but rather in Berg’s remark- cialism” (p. 7). Indeed, can anyone really able achievement of meticulously catalog- dispute that Western Marxism had been ing oppositional thought, as exemplied at least consistently critical, if not openly and ltered through the political orienta- hostile to “really existing socialism” (p. 7), tions and theoretical trajectories of New be it manifest in closed social formations Left Review and Socialist Register in Great of Eastern Europe or within open social Britain and Monthly Review and Dissent in formations of the imperial mainstream in the United States, against the globalized Western metropoles? As such, Berg’s study tide of advanced neo-liberal capitalist presents enough evidentiary momentum 130 | Buchbesprechungen towards suggesting that the geopolitical A question never the less arises to the as- trajectory of socialist projects themselves tute reader. In what sense then can such lent even more historical credence to a dis- contemporary orientations of Marxism cursive abandonment of once untouchable still be considered radical? Or if we are to dogmatic pillars of Marxist theory. e take DuBois4 seriously, or even Foucault5, lived implausibility of economic deter- just how radical was Marxism itself in rela- minism, dialectical materialism, and blind tion to modernity as imposed by western messianic faith in the working-class as the imperialist power? Berg himself accurately singular motor of linear historical progress captures this tension as “between radical thus fueled Post-Marxism as poststructur- critique and moderate recommendations” alist inected recongurations that ulti- (p. 309) which is damning in its accurate mately obscure if not completely abandon depiction of the obvious stalemate which such blatant theoretical vulnerabilities of encompasses any claim to radicalism with- Marxist thought. in the imperial mainstream to say the least. What eventually comes to the fore, howev- Intellectual Radicalism after 1989 is a er, is a disconcerting geopolitical complic- scholarly testament to Berg’s clear-sighted ity of Marxism, which though in historical devotion to the primacy of empirical re- opposition to capital, nds itself alarming- search as he compiles an impressive array ly at peace with Empire, or as Marx him- of theoretical wreckage and geopolitical self discloses, “in fact the veiled slavery of failure as aspirations towards a socialism, the wage labourers in Europe needed the which by its sheer historical emphasis on unqualied slavery of the New World as a materialist causality, never actually mate- its pedestal.”2 rializes in history. And yet, simultaneously As such, fundamental to this Post-Marxist implicit in the work itself is an unremit- orientation is a quietist resignation to the ting persistence of Marxist critique as an parliamentary democratic simulacrum of emancipatory imperative of redemption a civil society that is predicated upon rac- within modernity itself as a concerted sys- ist dehumanization and coloniality.3 As tematic opposition to the contemporary Berg’s work notably documents, “Marx- behemoth of globalized capital. ism’s anti-imperialist internationalism has However, was it not Sartre who warned us been replaced by an acceptance of the explicitly, that “you cannot, with impu- capitalist world system which again can nity, form generations of men by imbu- only be changed incrementally” (p. 44). ing them with successful, but false, ideas. Post-Marxism thus indulges in a cathartic What will happen if materialism sties the liberal disavowal of the revolutionary hu- revolutionary design to death one day?”6 If man agency required to overthrow unjust we are too follow the epistemological im- structural-inert power, as inherently totali- plications of Berg’s work, indeed, it would tarian. Of course, then, “it follows from seem that such a day is now upon us. this approach that the traditional Marx- Notes ist conception of revolution has run its course” (p. 43). 1 F. Fukuyama, e End of History and e Last Man, New York 1992. Buchbesprechungen | 131 2 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, New York [1867] in: e New Negro, ed. by A. Locke, New York 1990, p. 925. [1925] 1992, pp. 386, 402. Emphasis mine. 3 A. Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocen- 5 “At the deepest level of Western knowledge, trism and Latin America”, in: M. Morana, E. Marxism introduced no real discontinuity; it Dussel, and C. A. Juaregui (eds.), Coloniality at found its place without diculty, as a full, quiet, Large, Durham 2008, pp. 181–224. comfortable and, goodness knows, satisfying 4 “Modern imperialism and modern industrialism form for a time (its own), within an epistemolo- are one and the same system; root and branch gical arrangement that welcomed it gladly (since of the same tree. e race problem is the other it was this arrangement that was in fact making side of labor problem; … remembering always room for it) and that it, in return, had no in- that empire is the heavy hand of capital abroad tention of disturbing and, above all, no power … this almost naïve setting of the darker races to modify, even one jot, since it rested entirely beyond the pale of democracy and of modern upon it.” M. Foucault, e Order of ings, humanity … involves two things – acquiescence New York 1966, 1994, p. 261. of the darker peoples and agreement between 6 J.-P. Sartre, Materialism and Revolution, Lite- capital and labor in white democracies.” W. E. rary and Philosophical Essays, New York 1946, B. DuBois, “e Negro Mind Reaches Out”, 1962, p. 256..
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