TINA, as the Marxist political philosopher, historian and essayist Perry Anderson reminds us, stands for ‘there is no alternative’. Anderson’s article – Regime Change in the West? in the April edition of the London Review of Books – is, as might be expected, an exemplary piece of analysis. It unpicks the West’s recent economic history as it impacts on its politics as seen from his usual Leftist position. Oddly, however, it seems to me that his analysis is limited by its own form of Leftist TINAism.

I first read Perry Anderson in Issue 144 of the New Left Review, back in 1984. It contained his Modernity and Revolution – a critique of Marshal Berman’s book All that is Solid Melts into Air (originally a lecture) – along with Berman’s The Signs in the Street: a response to Perry Anderson. The fact that I still have my heavily annotated copy of that 1984 issue is testimony to my respect for Anderson’s analysis of the multiplicity of quite distinct modernisms in early twentieth-century art, a reading which has had a considerable influence on my own understanding. But I’ve also kept it as a tangible reminder of my ability, as a twenty-four-year-old, to try to “think through” the arguments of my elders, however persuasive, and to make my own judgements. To avoid, if you like, the seductions of other people’s implicit or explicit claims that ‘there is no alternative’ to their own authoritative views.

Anderson’s argument in 1984 was that European modernism in the first years of the twentieth century: ‘flowered in the space between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present, and a still unpredictable political future’. In short, as perhaps any good Marxist would, he assumes that the core co-ordinates on which his analysis must rest are cultural, technological and political. That assumption seemed to me then, as it does now, to ignore a significant aspect of the historical evidence. Namely, the roll of immerging and new forms of understanding of the sacred or spiritual, most notably perhaps those of theosophy and anthroposophy. Traces of such alternative belief systems can be seen in the art of, among others, Hilma af Klint, Kandinsky, Agnes Pelton, Malevich, Mondrian, Hyman Bloom, Beckman, Miró, Arthur Dove, and Paul Klee. A disparate line of alternative thinking that extends from the late nineteenth century through into the work of more recent artists, for example Joseph Beuys. I recognised even then that, as a subscriber to Marxism’s own brand of atheistic TINAism, Anderson could not be expected to give serious consideration to that evidence. 

My problem with Regime Change in the West? is not altogether different from Berman’s problem with Anderson’s critique of his book back in 1984. In short, that Anderson’s analysis, both knowledgeable and brilliant as it is in many respects, is based on a particular form of high-altitude thinking that simply does not acknowledge some all-important ground level evidence. Misses, that is, The Signs in the Street (the title of Berman’s NLR response to Anderson’s criticisms). There is only one brief mention of the “climate change” that threatens global disaster for us all in Regime Change in the West?, and, in its discussion of politics, none whatsoever of any Green Party throughout its analysis. It seems that Anderson remains the victim of the same form of Leftist TINAism, one that prevents him from seeing any way of addressing the maelstrom in which we find ourselves that does not conform to the Marxism on which he’s built a life-long career. 

Perhaps there’s a lesson here for us all. We may each have to let go of some of our most cherished beliefs, positions in which we are most heavily invested, if we are to face the reality of the local and global situations with which we are now confronted. We simply cannot afford to accept that ‘there is no alternative’ to the current status quo anywhere in any of its cultural, economic or political forms.