Jairus Banaji on A Marxist Mosaic
You open the book with an introduction reflecting on what you describe as “A Left Wing Life”. When did left-wing politics become important to you? Was there a specific moment or political event that convinced you to dedicate a lifetime of research and activism to furthering this project?
Left-wing politics became important to me in the late sixties. I can’t recall a specific moment or political event that set me on the path I followed in the next several decades. What I try to suggest in the introductory chapter is that the choices we make are shaped by a lot of one’s previous life, not in any deterministic sense of course but simply in terms of your family, the people you meet, the books you read and so on.
I describe the impact that [Arthur] Koestler’s Darkness at Noon had on me, the lonely figure of Rubashov besieged by a state he had, inadvertently, helped create. I also read a semi-fictional biography of Rimbaud when I was barely adolescent and remember how profoundly attracted I was to him and his extraordinary poetry, both Illuminations and Season in Hell. If there was one “event” that pushed me into the ranks of the left, I suppose it would have been my going to university, especially one like Oxford that had such a vibrant left in the late sixties.
But as I said, there is a whole background of unconscious or semi-conscious influences that go into shaping the choices we make. For most of us (probably) politics begins at home, in the family, with one’s first inchoate experiences of authority and figures of authority. That is where the left is either born or broken.
The phrase “A Marxist Mosaic” perfectly sums up this collection, with essays ranging from reflections on individual thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre or Ernest Mandel to wide-ranging historical studies of merchant capitalism and the peasantry. Those unfamiliar with your work might be surprised to hear about your background in classics. How did that shape your approach to Marxism?
The Classics course I did at Oxford used to be divided into five terms studying Greek and Latin literature and another seven terms that involved both Ancient History and Modern Philosophy. It was a well-rounded course and gave you a strong basis for moving in any of several quite different directions.
Since Modern Philosophy meant analytical or linguistic philosophy, this was the part of the course I hated most. In compensation for the mind-numbing stamp of my tutorials in Oxford philosophy, I turned instead to continental philosophers such as Hegel, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (books in French, German and so on were available at Parkers on Broad Street), which in turn made Marx’s Capital more accessible. In the other part of the Greats course, namely, Ancient History, I found myself drawn to Roman history. I had read [Ronald] Syme’s Tacitus before I went to Oxford. Whether or not Syme was consciously influenced by [Lewis] Namier, this was largely political history and interesting at its own level.
But, as I’ve said in Marxist Mosaic, it was my reading of [Michael] Rostovtzeff that first introduced me to social and economic history and gave me a chance to start thinking “in a Marxist way” about Antiquity. Rostovtzeff was way ahead of his time in terms of the use he made of the archaeology (as it was then) and also for his modernism, the idea that Antiquity contained forms of capital and a more sophisticated economy than Bücher’s evolutionism could allow for. The example of Rostovzteff is interesting in another way: it’s dangerous to assess the quality of a scholar’s work in terms of the political views he/she holds or might have held. Rostovtzeff was a Russian conservative, fiercely opposed to the Bolsheviks, yet he produced a masterpiece when he published his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire in 1926.
What, in your view, are the benefits of an eclectic or open – rather than a doctrinaire – approach to Marxism?
An “open” approach to Marxism rules out the sort of closure that all forms of dogmatism and sectarianism entail, inevitably. This was the point Sartre made with considerable force in the essay that introduces the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), his “Questions de méthode”, which contains a sharp attack on the conception of theory as “pure, fixed knowledge” and of Marxism as an “already totalized knowledge”, ideas he identified as a major part of Stalinism’s legacy. If historical materialism is going to work, it has to allow for the view that in history, and the social sciences more widely, our collective knowledge is always only a provisional synthesis. There are no final words, least of all in an area as challenging intellectually as the history of capitalism itself. Research only ever progresses slowly and the ability of intellectuals to assimilate it fully so as make lasting contributions is an even slower process.
Until [Alberto] Toscano published Late Fascism in 2023, our image of fascism was overwhelmingly shaped by debates and experiences born out of the catastrophes of interwar Europe. Some of those debates threw up ideas that can help clarify why the far right today has made massive inroads (e.g. Arthur Rosenberg’s underscoring of the “mass base” of fascist movements), but what will matter to struggles today and in the future is the kind of willingness to think from scratch that Toscano displays. The only other book I can think of that displays a similar tendency but from the Christian left, so to speak, is Chris Hedges’ American Fascists (2007).
There is a whole agenda out there waiting for a younger generation of the left to lay out in a rigorous and comprehensive way. But that is an agenda that will simply collapse if it subscribes to “orthodoxies” and other forms of intellectual snobbery. And it is an agenda that has to draw on a multiplicity of struggles, the lessons they throw up, and the reflections they gave rise to (Black liberation, socialist feminism, the Arab “spring”) if the language of revolutionary politics is ever going to see the kind of renewal and overhaul it desperately needs.