Jesuit Commonwealth versus Liberal Empire: R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Primitive Communism, and the British Left at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Our world is dominated by U.S. capitalism as the world of a century ago was by British capitalism. Contemporary American capitalism's writ runs free over the earth, bothered neither by the Second World collectivism nor by the Third World nationalism of the twentieth century. The antiglobalization movement it has elicited remains inchoate, much of it oblivious to the classical Marxist notion that any supersession of the present world order would have to come from within the metabolism of the system itself.

A century ago the British Left looked out onto an empire as global in its reach as that of the United States today. Indeed, as Doug Henwood puts it, "Though casual observers treat this borderless world as a recent invention, it's more than a little reminiscent of life before World War I," a life that John Maynard Keynes evoked as "[one where the] inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth" (Henwood 1997, 106).

This essay is concerned with the metropolitan turn-of-the- twentieth-century opposition to this "idyll." It is plausible to say that the very vastness of the British Empire stretched its own internal opposition very thin: there was just so much to be against. At any rate, British radical and socialist thought suffered from a marked lack of systematicity—a topic to which this essay will turn in its conclusion. The Empire also, however, generated anger on the British Left and, to match it, a torrent of energetic and generically mixed writing that offers a resource of models for radicals today, whether socialist or not.

One of these texts is R. B. Cunninghame Graham's A Vanished Arcadia: Being Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay, 1607-1767, published in 1901. This essay will examine Graham'soeuvre, with stress on A Vanished Arcadia, in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialist discourses on primitive communism and other forms of putative protosocialism. My hope is that this discussion will provide some tools for rethinking the socialist project one hundred years after the publication of A Vanished Arcadia.

A Weird Sport

The one-hundred-and-sixty-year-old "episode" of "communist" socioeconomic development in the territory presided over by the Jesuit order in South America is one that provokes consideration of the development options available to people in precapitalist social formations when capitalism enters their world. The twentieth century saw a whole cycle of soi-disant "socialist" attempts in less developed countries to bypass capitalism via social formations based on autarky and state-imposed collectivism. It is now clear that such regimes played a role analogous to a very primitive form of capitalism.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century socialists find themselves confronting questions similar to those confronted by Graham, William Morris, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxembourg, and James Connolly at the opening of the twentieth century. Is a future beyond capitalism imaginable and possible? How does socialism relate to capitalist development? Ought socialism to be conceived of as the absolute negation of bourgeois liberalism? Is socialism a necessary, but insufficient, condition for female emancipation? How should we assess past attempts to establish, or to dream, socialism? And so on.

It is my contention that the answers to such questions lie, in part, in a reexamination of the culture of the Western socialist movement of the period before the Russian Revolution and the incubus of Stalinism, and this present essay is conceived of as a contribution to that process.

In his essay "The Ends of History,"Perry Anderson reflected on the Jesuit enterprise in the context of a consideration of the prospects for socialism provoked by Lutz Niethammer's Posthistorie (1992) and Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History" (1989). Of...