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PART I
Marxism and capitalism
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1
THE MARXIST TRADITION OF HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE WEST
Georg G. Iggers
This chapter on the relevance of Marxism for historiography today developed originally from a review I wrote of a collection of essays edited by Chris Wickham, Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century.1 The question raised by the volume was whether after the collapse of the institutional basis of Marxist historiography—of the Soviet Union, the Soviet-dominated states in the East, and of the Communist parties in the West—Marxist ideas still possessed significance at the beginning of the present century. Two possible answers have been offered: One is by Jonathan Sperber in his recent Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013) in which he comments that
In either case Marx must be understood as a nineteenth-century thinker who belongs to the past and has little relevance for the twenty-first century. Another perspective is that of Eric Hobsbawm, a committed adherent to the communist ideal, who had placed great confidence in the achievement of communism in the Soviet Union, but nevertheless in the chapter “End of Socialism” in The Age of Extremes (1997) paints a highly negative picture of the Soviet Union, viewing it not only as an economic disaster, but also condemning its repressive political system without abandoning his ideal of communism. In brief, Marx for him is not responsible for Stalin. He would agree with Sperber in the book of essays that he published in 2011, a year before his death, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism, that “much of what he [Marx] wrote is out of date, and some of it is not or no longer acceptable,” but then ends the book concluding that “economic and political liberalism . . . cannot solve the problems of the twenty-first century. Once again the time has come to take Marx seriously.”3 One serious limitation of the Wickham volume is that its discussion is exclusively Eurocentric with six British, one American, and one Italian contributor.
The theoretical basis of Marxism and its transformation
The question, of course, arises of what is understood by a Marxist conception or a Marxist approach to history and what are those aspects of Marx’s thought that are still relevant to historical analysis today. This chapter deals with Marxist historiography in the West, the region in which, after all, Marxism originated. It, however, views the West in a very broad way, including North America, on which there will also be a separate chapter (Chapter 2), and the Anglophone world generally, including Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and to a certain extent even India and Latin America, because Marxist discussions cross continental lines. At the same time it is aware of profound differences in the development of Marxist thought in what we have arbitrarily defined as the West and the formerly colonized areas of the world, reflecting fundamental differences in the political, social, and cultural context of Marxist thought in economically highly developed regions and less or unevenly developed areas.
The problem that arises in the attempt to define what constitutes the core of Marxism is that, while Marx was in many ways a dogmatic thinker, he by no means presented a coherent view of society or politics, but contradicted himself on important points, particularly as regards politics. He must be seen as a thinker of the nineteenth century whose analysis of the society of his time has not only been outdated by basic changes that have taken place since then, but that reflect Marx’s incomplete and in many ways incorrect understanding of his own time.
The question then remains of what constitutes the fundamental elements of Marx’s theories in their nineteenth-century context, which later were often referred to as “orthodox Marxism,” and how much remains valid in the very different circumstances of the early twenty-first century. We shall cite several important passages in which Marx formulates his conception of society and history. One is contained in the frequently cited preface to his book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, first published in 1859, in brief that “legal relations as well as forms of state are to be grasped neither by themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life,” and that the “economic production and the structure of society arising there from constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch,” that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”4 The other is a conception of history as an ongoing dialectical process by which the conflict between changing modes of production and property relations, which takes the form of class conflict, leads to a classless, i.e. communist, society, overcoming the bourgeois order. These two points constituted the core of the ideology accepted first by the Second and then by the Third International, which became the official doctrine of the Soviet Union and of Western Communist parties. Yet equally important, or even more important, is that while Marxism views itself as a scientific form of socialism, it sees science not in terms of neutral objectivity but as political, specifically revolutionary, practice. As Marx had already written in 1845 in the first thesis on Feuerbach:
The famous eleventh thesis then proclaims: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways, the point is to change it.”5 Finally two key ideas of Marx should be mentioned: the critique of capitalism that remains central to all Marxist thought until today, even if the nature of this critique may have undergone changes; and his belief in the “iron necessity”6 of historical development leading to a communist society, which in its original form has been largely abandoned.
The contradictions in Marx’s political views led after his and Engels’ death in two different directions. On the one hand, there was Marx’s view of the Robespierre phase of the French Revolution as the prototype of the revolution that justified violence, terrorism, and dictatorship; on the other, Marx’s, and particularly Engels’, rejection of insurgency and their insistence that the revolution can only occur at the right point of economic and political development. Marx and Engels saw the industrial proletariat as the driving force of revolutionary change. In turn the working-class movements that emerged in continental Europe after the 1860s had, for the most part, a socialist orientation and the most important source of their political perspective was the thought of Karl Marx,7 unlike in Great Britain where Fabian rather than Marxian ideas played an important role in the formation of the Labour Party around 1900, and in the United States where socialism played a marginal role. It is important to keep in mind that none of the important Marxist theorists of the period between 1890 and 1930 was an academician; they were all engaged in political action, e.g. Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Jean Jaurès, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotzky, Antonio Gramsci, Joseph Stalin, to name only a few of the leading socialists.8 Building on the contradiction in Marx’s political thought, two different directions emerged within the socialist working-class movement: one revolutionary, identified with Lenin, calling not for a dictatorship of the proletariat but for a dictatorship of the party in the name of the revolutionary working class; the other social democracy, which had its greatest strength in the German Kaiserreich, which sought to achieve a democratic form of socialism through political reform, trusting that the working class would in the end gain political power. This was a position that Engels endorsed too shortly before his death in 1895.9
The transformation of Marxist history-writing up to 1990
Marxism-Leninism
The Leninist position, dubbed by Stalin as “Marxism-Leninism,” became the official doctrine of the Soviet Union, as we already indicated. It prohibited any meaningful deviation from what it considered the orthodox position of Marxism, although it interpreted the dictatorship of the proletariat as the dictatorship of the party, and thus introduced a voluntarist note. In fact this control was not total, as Mikhail Krom’s indicates in his chapter on Russian historiography in this volume (Chapter 3). Well before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, historians moved away to more independent positions, such as the remarkable turn to cultural history by Aaron Gurevich. In Poland and Hungary, the break with Marxism-Leninism occurred much earlier, as early as 1956, as it did also in Yugoslavia around the journal Praxis, and quite independently from the Soviet Union in China after the end of the Cultural Revolution. There were other followers of Lenin who did not identify with Stalin, most notably Trotzky, but they shared the belief in the dictatorship of the party. By 1989 they were highly marginalized and survived primarily in academic circles. Yet outside the realm of the Soviet Union, the “orthodox” conception of Marxism to which Marxism-Leninism adhered had long been abandoned.
Transformation of the concept of class
Marx and Engels’ conception of class underwent a fundamental revision in Marxist historiography in the course of the second half of the twentieth century. Yet already very early in 1899 Eduard Bernstein, who had been a close associate of Engels in English exile and later played an important role in the German Social Democratic Party, in his book, Evolutionary Socialism,10 considered Marx and Engels’ conception of class, as formulated in its classical form in The Communist Manifesto, as oversimplified. While Marx and Engels had predicted that in the “epoch of the bourgeoisie” class antagonisms would be “simplified” and ultimately only two classes, proletariat and bourgeoisie, would confront each other, Bernstein pointed out that in the half century since then this had not occurred, that the process of industrialization had not resulted in general impoverishment of the working population, but instead had seen the emergence of small entrepreneurs who had profited from the process of industrialization, a middle class not identical with the bourgeoisie as Marx and Engels had defined it.
While Bernstein was committed to an “evolutionary socialism” achieved through reforms in cooperation with liberal elements of the middle classes, Antonio Gramsci, founder and head of the Italian Communist Party, in the immediate years after World War I, remained firmly committed to revolutionary socialism, but saw the process of revolution very differently from Marx and Engels. He no longer saw the industrial working class or proletariat as the principal agent of revolution. While a prisoner of Mussolini, he dealt in jail in notes posthumously published as Prison Notebooks11 with the problem why in Italy not the Communists but the Fascists succeeded. Marx’s conception of a revolutionary proletariat and his refusal to recognize the importance of other exploited segments of the population, peasants, who Marx ...
