Marxist History writing for the Twenty-first Century - PR9

In defence of Marxist history writing; Marxist History writing for the Twenty-first Century

In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx wrote “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please”. The last few decades show that this is as true of historiography as it is of history itself....writes Matthew Cobb..

Thirty years ago, Marxism was a common language in university history and sociology departments. Today that has changed utterly, the class struggle is quaint and old-fashioned compared with popular culture, sexuality, gender or race.

This is partly a question of academic fashion – historians have historically made a career by trashing the approaches of their predecessors – but something far deeper has been taking place, which is obviously linked to the world-shaking political and economic changes that have taken place over the last 20 years or so.

So what better than a Marxist critique of just why Marxism is so generally marginalised? And two recent collections of articles, Marxist History-writing, based on a conference held in 2004 to examine the usefulness (or not) of Marxist historiography, and History and Revolution, aim to counter the reactionary views of the history of revolutions that have recently been revived in both academia and popular history writing.

Chris Wickham argues in Marxist History-writing, that the decline of Marxism can be traced back to the receding European radical tide of the 1960s and 70s, and not just to the collapse of Stalinism since 1989. This key event meant that not only have the old certainties been swept away – particularly amongst the once-substantial layers of Stalinist intellectuals – but young people have not been inspired by mass class struggles to view the past through Marxist eyes.

Instead, the rise of national and religious struggles and the trivia of the western media’s obsession with celebrity have reinforced the flight from class.

Andrea Giardina in her chapter on Roman history in Marxist History-writing, discusses the hypocrisy of those who dismiss Marxist history as teleological, by highlighting the tendency of stridently anti-Marxist modern historians to look for the “roots” of modern features in the past. As she accurately says, “Its teleology is far more insidious than that blamed on the concepts of ‘mode of production’ and ‘transition’, because it is apparently based on common sense.” The next time you see Simon Schama waving his hands and talking about the “roots” of this or that, you know what to shout at the TV.

Some of the articles in Marxist History-writing are disappointing – worst is Gareth Stedman Jones’ chapter, which is based on Marx’s alleged decision to “abandon” writing Capital because he knew he could not come up with a description of the workings of communist society. As Stedman Jones cheerily admits, Marx did this “without telling anyone”, which is perhaps why it took 130 years and Gareth Stedman Jones to notice. Alex Callinicos starts well with a spritely discussion of Trotskyist history writing, but drifts off into a long polemic with Perry Anderson and a justification of the SWP’s theory of state capitalism, neither of which are particularly novel or useful. While, Eric Hobsbawm’s rambling piece, bizarrely claims that the modern understanding of human evolutionary molecular genetics “liberates us from the bogus debates on whether history is or not a science”.

Surprisingly, only one of the contributions – Catherine Hall’s “Marxism and Its Others” – takes head-on the modern emphasis on gender, race and power relations and examines the dialectic between a Marxist class-struggle approach to events and these alternative focuses. She takes an extremely short period – Britain from 1828-1833 – to study what light Marxism can shed on events and which vital parts of history remain unexplored unless other interpretative frameworks are employed. Interestingly, hers is the only chapter in either book that provides any accounts from ordinary people of how they viewed earth-shaking events. Hall argues that a full understanding of her chosen period requires a focus on the roles of gender and of the importance of the colonies, both of which, she implies, are invisible to Marxism.

This raises the obvious question – not systematically addressed in either book – about what exactly Marxist history is. For Robert Brenner, in his extended chapter on the nature of feudalism, it involves analysing the political economy of a given period. For most of human history, this in turn implies developing Marxist theory in order to have appropriate analytical tools. Brenner does not believe that there is a strict link between economic interests and the behaviour of individuals or classes. Against the kind of crude reductionism which was the stock in trade of many Stalinist historians in the past and it continues to be the argument used by many modern historians determined to reject a Marxist approach.

A more general view would be that Marxist history has to be based on class analysis of events. As Marx and Engels put it at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. Even here, however, there are problems.

Most of the authors in Marxist History-writing refer admiringly to Marx’s 18th Brumaire, (which, as Alex Callinicos points out, was not written as history but as a guide to the present, which is partly what makes it so thrilling to read) but none of them explore the successes and limits of Marx’s approach, or its mixed legacy in less able hands.

Marx was able to powerfully dissect the deep class interests underlying the political tendencies during the French revolutionary events of 1848-1851, and to periodise the swings of the struggle. But could our view of this period be qualitatively enriched by introducing the insights from a modern interest in gender or the voices of the voiceless? This would have been a more convincing approach for Catherine Hall and a more effective test of the strengths and weaknesses of Marx’s historical method.

On the other hand, such a deep class analysis is not necessarily useful for studying every past event, nor, as Chris Wickham explains in his essay on medieval history, is it necessarily what every historian wants to focus on, no matter what his or her politics. Not every political difference or historical event can be explained in terms of deep class interests, and an emphasis on periodisation may substitute for a more profound analysis of the factors involved. The trap of over-interpretation has been hilariously explored in Carlo M. Cipolla’s untranslated spoof essay “Pepper, the motor-force of history”, which demonstrates that the Crusades, the Hundred Years war and the Renaissance were all caused by the aphrodisiac effects of pepper. Some of that kind of self-deprecating understanding would have spiced up these contributions.

As Big Brother’s Party slogan has it in George Orwell’s 1984: “Those who control the past, control the future: who controls the present controls the past”. The revival of liberal “revisionist” accounts of revolution from the ilk of Simon Schama, François Furet and Orlando Figes is the most acute expression of the decline in Marxist historiography.

In History and Revolution a series of contributors albeit lower on the academic ladder than the Oxbridge, UCLA and London Professors who feature in Marxist History-writing, take on the main “revisionist” accounts – although disappointingly, Robert Service is not dealt with in any detail. But what the contributors lack in academic kudos they make up for with the more overtly political perspective that informs their writing. Most of them are around the British SWP or the French LCR, and convincingly show that the revisionists are in fact merely re-treads of contemporary reactionary descriptions, from Edmund Burke in the 18th century to any number of politicians in the 20th.

Jim Wolfreys, Marc Ferro and Enzo Traverso take up cudgels against Furet and Stéphane Courtois, who have presented self-consciously revisionist – and infuriatingly lightweight – accounts of the history of French revolution and of Communism, respectively. But these are relatively well-behaved rebuttals, with none of the savagery that their targets deserve. Florence Gauthier’s rich chapter on the rise and fall of the democratic programme of the French Revolution does not even explicitly engage with, far less “refute”, revisionist accounts of this period. Despite the subtitle of the book (Refuting Revisionism), there are disappointingly few polemics.

Geoff Kennedy’s chapter on the English revolution makes an excellent crib-guide to recent debates and shows the weakness of the liberal vision based on contingent or psychological factors rather than class forces. Probably the most original contribution is Lars Lih’s description of how War Communism looked from the inside. Based on a close analysis of Trotsky’s writings from 1920, Lih’s chapter shows how, when faced with civil war and invasion, the Bolsheviks were extremely sober about their situation. There is no evidence to support the anti-Marxists’ claim that the Bolsheviks were so out of touch that the USSR was a kind of “theatre of the absurd” in which dreams were taken for reality.

Mike Haynes addresses one of the implications of the “revisionist” accounts of revolutions that the revolutionaries were the “baddies”, while the “goodies” were the liberals, by tracing the failure of liberalism in the Russian Revolution of 1917, and showing how they were not out-manoeuvred by the wily and anti-democratic Bolsheviks, but rather that they made wrong political choices based on a false understanding of the forces in motion. Were the revisionist historians to step into the Tardis and turn up in Petrograd, even with the wisdom of hindsight they would make the same mistakes and experience the same failure. Like their past political counterparts, they are destined for the dustbin of history – TV tie-ins and all.

And funnily enough while the contributors to both collections are well able to analyse the weaknesses of their contemporary opponents, they too are unable to escape the confines of the historical period from which they emerged.

Part of the reason for the marginalisation of Marxism in contemporary social life and academia is the inability of Marxist historians and social theorists to bring it alive for a modern audience. This is surprising given that “history is the new black” in the publishing world (including in the magazine industry), and – in UK schedules at least – TV programmes about history are even more prevalent than those about cooking or property. Faced with this public appetite for history, the Marxist historians writing in these volumes seem simply to have passed by on the other side.

What would a modern popular Marxist history look like? Would it be carefully didactic, strictly interpreting selected events in an orthodox framework, like Gordon Childe’s What Happened in History? Or would it be positively unpreachy, focussing on inspiring class-struggle moments, providing eye-witness accounts and allowing the reader to draw the necessary conclusions, like Paul Mason’s recent Live Working or Die Fighting? And how would it cope with the recent trend to “micro-history” – what would a Marxist analysis add to Mark Kurlansky’s Cod or Dana Sobel’s Longitude?

By turning their attention to popular perceptions of history, they could undoubtedly satisfy both the public’s desire for gripping, personal stories, and demonstrate the power of Marxism by underlining the importance of putting those events into a political, class-based context. Any one of Simon Schama’s books could have been written a hundred times better by a Marxist, and should have been. The problem is not only the attitude of publishers; it also lies in the imagination of Marxist historians. They need to reach out and provide the next generation of historians – in particular school-students and undergraduates, as well as the general public – with rousing examples of class-based writing, which explain the past, cast light on the present and show us a different future.

Matthew Cobb lectures at the  University of Manchester. His book on the French Resistance in World War Two will be published in 2009

Sat 04, October 2008 @ 13:11