Making a new manifesto: New Left Review and Rethinking MARXISM

New Left Review 1 Jan/Feb 2000
Rethinking MARXISM Vol 11, no. 3 1999

Reviewed by:
Dr Cath Ellis
English Studies Program University of Wollongong

On the back page of the latest London Review of Books, the New Left Review is being advertised as the new New Left Review. Understandably Perry Anderson has called his editorial for the first NLR in 2000 "Renewals". In it, Anderson goes to some lengths to explain, and perhaps justify, the rationale behind the redesign, re-launch and indeed renumbering of the journal that has, since 1960, been the most respected voice of left politics in the UK. As such, this editorial is, effectively, an article in itself. In "Renewals" Anderson puts down a manifesto for the future of NLR that simultaneously makes sense of the past and achieves some distance from it. As such, he works to reposition the journal within the new historical and political climate that has grown up in the past decade and to rethink the scope of NLR as a contestatory voice in the new and rapidly changing world in which it is placed.

And I'm not kidding about the renumbering. A brief note on the inside cover explains: "With this issue of NLR starts a new series, numbered from one onwards. References to issues of the journal between 1960 and 1999 will henceforth run as NLR (I) 1-238 and from January 2000 onwards as NLR (II) plus numeral". This will, no doubt, offer some comfort to the thousands of serials librarians around the world faced with a cataloguing nightmare. But it also raises the question of how 'real' this break is. In other words, are these changes marking a substantive intellectual and ideological break with the past or are they merely stylistic, structural or cosmetic? Is this, in any real sense, a new journal or just a new look journal?

Having read through Anderson's "Renewals" the answer, to my mind, falls somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, Anderson declares "Four decades later, the environment in which NLR took shape has all but completely passed away" (9). From his discussion it is clear that his mission, as editor, is to offer a new and more powerful voice to speak against the "virtually uncontested consolidation, and universal diffusion, of neo-liberalism" (10). His case is that, as it stood, NLR was simply losing its capacity to effect any real change. Even so, this new NLR has objectives that appear significantly similar to those of its past: "The journal should always be in sympathy with strivings for a better life, no matter how modest their scope"(14). To mark the shift from the old to the new NLR, Anderson takes up a surprisingly rhetorical stance: "The test of NLR's capacity to strike a distinctive political note should be how often it can calmly shock readers by calling a spade a spade, rather than falling in with well-meaning cant or self-deception on the Left. The sprit of the Enlightenment rather than the Evangelicals is what is most needed today" (15).

He devotes, however, considerable space to the cosmetic aspects of the new NLR particularly the "classic courtesy" of footnotes at the bottom of the page, as opposed to end notes or the "sub-literate" 'Harvard' referencing system (23). One wonders how courteous it is when, for the bulk of Franco Moretti's piece entitled "Conjectures on World Literature", the reader is confronted with pages that are bottom heavy with footnotes, forcing the main body of the article to slip into a slim band at the top of the page. The 'cosmetic' or structural changes include the introduction of a space devoted to 'polemics' that are chosen, according to Anderson, not for their "political correctness" but for their "originality and vigour of argument"(24). This must be received as an ideologically sound innovation but surely one that simply reorganises that which NLR was already very good at.

In his final statement, Anderson writes about the scope of the new NLR and his desire, as editor, to attract contributions from outside Western Europe. While this is, undoubtedly a noble objective, even Anderson admits the difficulty in realising it. Just like in the halcyon days of the 1970s, it is clear that the same names are already recurring in this new NLR with Franco Moretti appearing in three of the first four editions and Benedict Anderson turning up twice. It also remains a really bloke-heavy journal - perhaps another problem that is hard to fix.

While NLR has been forced to reposition itself as a result of the political and economic events of the last decade, another journal has emerged in that time in the United States. Rethinking MARXISM was launched in the Spring of 1988 and has grown to become one of the most rigorous and interesting left journals published today. In that time its aims, as proclaimed on its inside cover, have remained unchanged: to encourage thinking and writing that explores and debates the "power and social consequences of Marxian economic, cultural and social analysis."

Born out of the collaborative and individual work of the members of the Association for Economic and Social Analysis (based at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst) the journal boasts a long and impressive list of advisers and editors including Etienne Balibar, Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, Ernest Laclau and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. But its real energy comes from its obvious devotion to discussion and collaboration. Very few articles in this journal come without a brief acknowledgement to a selection of people who have offered comments and suggestions. This, in conjunction with the large amount of collaborative work published in the journal, offers a sense of a very real and lively intellectual community that works in and around this journal.

In comparing the two journals it is very true that they offer some of the most interesting and rigorous writing from the left that is available today. There is a sense, however, that the profound, pronounced and prolonged manifesto pieced together by Perry Anderson in NLR appears decidedly proscriptive next to the broad scope and inclusive aims of its North American rival.