Issues of class and culture: an interview with Aijaz Ahmad - Interview

Monthly Review, Oct, 1996 by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Question: In your book In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures you observe that American literary theory in the last two decades has been remarkably devoid of influences from the major work in Marxist political economy that has been done in the United States, not least by Monthly Review and its publishing house. Why is this significant? Why does literary theory need Marxist political economy?

Ahmad: The latter part of your question can be answered more briefly. Culture is not reducible to those processes that Marxist political economy studies for its own purposes, but culture is embedded in those processes. The so-called "mass culture" today is quite inseparable from processes of mass production, marketing, profiteering, systems of mass communication, etc. Every social practice and all material production involves signification, but neither communication nor fashion nor any other of those things that Cultural Studies takes as its specific object of study is merely or even mainly a signifying practice. Nor can the relation between cultural production and its basis in economic and political processes be read off anecdotally or epiphenominally; it has to be studied rigorously and structurally. You can't just throw in a bit of economics here, a bit of technology there; you have to be able to locate individual facts in a complex historical process, and for that you need very considerable theoretical preparedness. In its beginnings Cultural Studies was quite aware of all this, and some have sought to remain true to those very prosaic origins. In the main, though, Cultural Studies has itself become one of those many styles of consumer capitalism that it sets out to study.

But my reference to Monthly Review that you have recalled meant a great deal more than that. Implied in it was my own sense of the overall structure of the output - in the journal and from the press - that one associates with Monthly Review. It seems to me that in the postwar United States Monthly Review has been the only institution of the Left which provides a full-fledged narrative of the world, for the very period in which this institution has functioned. One doesn't have to agree with all aspects of this narrative, but what I want to emphasize is that there is a narrative of the world more comprehensive than any that has come from any other source in the Anglophone world, and this narrative includes, equally the structures of advanced capitalism as well as the attempts to overthrow it or at least transform it. In scope, this output has been less occupied with Western Europe and Japan, and the latter I think is a special lacuna; but this narrative includes comprehensive histories of people's struggles - specifically revolutionary struggles - a matter that stands in sharp contrast to the output of the New Left Review and its press, the only institution of the Left over the past three decades, albeit outside the United States, that may be compared with Monthly Review either in ambition or in achievement. It is interesting to me that Monthly Review has been relatively less concerned with Western Europe, which has been New Left Review's special provenance.

This narrative has some specific features. One is that although it broke with what became of the Soviet state with Stalin and thereafter, it did not become hostile to the myriad Communist movements as such, be they in Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, India, or anywhere else, not to speak of the many revolutionary movements which were not formally communist but were of that kind of inspiration. The criterion of solidarity was not that a movement be Stalinist or Trotskyist or Maoist or Guevarrist or whatever, but that it be revolutionary in a sense that would be recognizably so from a Marxist perspective. I don't mean that I agree with every judgment Monthly Review made based on this principle (its treatment of the Chinese Cultural Revolution is a case in point) but I do greatly support the principle. This remarkable combination of non-sectarianism and profound respect for the revolutionary enterprise gave to the principal tendency of Monthly Review also a remarkable resilience against the two great temptations of our time: social democratic degeneration on the one hand, romance of the national bourgeoisies on the other - and this without devaluing either the importance of whatever reform the working people might be able to win or the importance of anti-imperialist nationalism in the imperialized world. I might add that the editors of Monthly Review have had an exemplary commitment to a certain level of linguistic communication that is necessary for socialist activism. I think that in these times of professionalised jargons on the Left it needs to be said that those "Review of the Month" essays in which Sweezy and Magdoff have over the years given us such lucid analyses of intricate details of high capitalist finance are gems of English prose. That prose should be compulsory reading for Derrideans.

I remember teaching Braverman's great book to undergraduates who had no background in economics and communicating to them something essential, something concrete about what has happened to the American working class in this century. I think a profound sensitivity to work of that kind would yield us a very different sense of what gets called "mass culture" in today's Cultural Studies. As I look back on that stream of books that came out of the Monthly Review Press about revolutionary struggles in a host of imperialized countries - Cuba, Vietnam, Guinea-Bissau, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, China, Egypt, and many others - I am firmly convinced that anyone who had seriously attended to the lessons of that documentation could never so easily downgrade the whole question of revolutionary class struggle in favor of "national allegory," "hybridity," "postcoloniality" or whatever else happens to be the fashion of the day. Monthly Review is of course not the only source for knowledge of that kind, but in the United States it has been the largest such source and comparatively the most reliable. So, I find it quite reprehensible that American leftists who want to do radical work in areas of culture and ideology, and who constantly make large statements about the politics of the modern world, especially "Third World," have been so little engaged with the body of theory and information made available by this institution.