One very obvious thing distinguishes Marx from most of his predecessors: he made no claims to
neutrality, either as something he was capable of accomplishing or, indeed, as something to be
aspired to. The dominant ideology of historians and historical thinkers before Marx had been their
aspiration to a disengaged, birds-eye view of history. History could appear, for them, as an
objective account of man's progress towards liberty, or alternatively, as in Ranke's resonant
statement, the claim that 'every age is equal before God' – the implication here being that the
historian should share God's supposed detachment. Marx, by contrast, was a partisan – of social
revolution and of the working class – and he gloried in this partisanship. If there is a specific
ideology at work here, it is this: only to an absolutely engaged and active perspective that sought to
intervene in history, that took sides, could historical truth be accessible.
There's something else that is closely related to this: the question of why we might need history.
For most of Marx's predecessors, we can – at the risk of some simplification – state that they
believed in a 'contemplative' role for historical thought. Ranke is a classic exponent of this view: for
him, scholarly enquiry's value lay in its ability to appreciate the diverse vistas and historical forms
of humanity. Moral lessons could be drawn from this: history could work, for the present, as a
source of wonder, or of inspiration, or of warning. Marx, on the other hand, above all seemed to
consider history as a riddle that needed solving. History, from this perspective, does not yield up its
truths transparently: behind the surface of historical events and processes that seem 'obvious',
there lie another set of events and processes, which can only be brought to light through the work
of decoding. And there's yet another twist to this: as his thought developed, Marx increasingly
came to believe, and assert, that 'understanding' history was not merely an intellectual, but also a
practical task. There were definite patterns to historical development, distinct 'tendencies', as he
put it, that only became self-evident and visible once they had run their course. To truly engage
with history was to capture it in motion, to understand the secrets of its movement, and, above all,
to participate in this movement. Marx once famously wrote that 'the philosophers have only
interpreted the world, in different ways; the point, however, is to change it'. This has often been
interpreted as a statement to the effect 'enough talking about the world, let's get down to doing
something about it'. But it's more complicated than that: the significance of this statement, it
might be argued, is that it is addressed precisely to philosophers. Criticism and scholarship, Marx
argued, held value principally as a practical activity, and not as abstract contemplation.
Some reference to Marx's life might be of use to make sense of all this. History was indeed moving
rapidly, in uncharted waters, in the Europe in which Marx lived. He was brought up in a liberal
family in Trier, a town in the Prussian Rhineland which had been deeply affected by the French
Revolution, the Napoleonic invasions of Europe, and the conservative, monarchical restoration that
followed. Born in 1818, Marx would be, throughout his life, caught in the cross-hairs of the
processes of revolution and restoration. In his own lifetime, he saw three epochal events: the
revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and the Paris Commune of 1871. In other words, Marx's Europe saw
regular revolutionary convulsions, alliances between ruling powers and dominant social classes in the
attempt to defeat these revolutions, and concrete historical changes that resulted from this clash.
Each political upsurge in Marx's lifetime had its epicentre in France, with continent-wide
implications. Utopian visions of social transformation were one side of the coin; moods of despair in
radical and liberal circles following royal restorations another. It is not hard to relate Marx's view
of history to these violent reversals in political mood and atmosphere. Through the 1840s, the
formative decade for the development of Marx's political thought, he would move between Cologne,
Brussels and Paris, Continental cities deeply marked by the experience, or the anticipation, or the
apprehension, of radical republican revolution. This left one sort of imprint on Marx's thought: it
was from these experiences that he derived his deep solidarity with working-class struggles that
sought to realize substantive visions of democracy, and it was from these, too, that he derived his
diagnosis of why the European revolutions were apparently defeated, and the consequences of this
defeat.
But there was also another life experience that marked his thought even more deeply: he spent the
last 34 years of his life in Britain, a country relatively immune from the violent convulsions of
European political events. This Britain, politically a sink of reaction for much of the nineteenth
century, nevertheless was witnessing its own kind of revolution: a transformation of the material and
social basis of human existence, and the rapid development of industrial bourgeoisie and industrial
proletariat, on a scale vastly more advanced than continental Europe. All his life, Marx was struck
by the paradox of this contrast: Britain, despite the growth of a substantial urban working class
which he identified as the revolutionary agent of the future, was, from his perspective, politically so
backward. And France, despite the relative underdevelopment of its capitalism (it remained a
dominantly agricultural, small-holding society) saw immense political ferment. As Marx pondered
these questions, specifically economic questions became more and more dominant in his work, and
the last thirty years of his life were spent delving deeper and deeper into the mysteries of capitalist
commodity-production, exchange and circulation, and the evolving relations between industrial
employers and workers as they became, in his account, the 'fundamental' classes of society.
Let me now turn to how Marx thought about history, and the roles that it came to play in his
thought. Was Marx a systematic theorist or philosopher of history? In one sense the answer is
clearly no. It was never his purpose to lay out methodological guidelines for academics and
intellectuals. He read deeply and widely in diverse periods of history, but unlike his comrade Engels,
produced few works which we can simply understand as 'works of history', at least in the academic
sense we're all familiar with. At another level, history was absolutely fundamental to his thought.
Let me briefly explore the ways in which this might be true.
At the heart of this we have the idea of the dialectic. Marx's philosophy, certainly at the outset and
arguably through his whole life, took the form of an encounter with the intellectual tradition of
German Idealism, the dominant branch of critical thought in late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury Germany. The Big Four of German 'idealist' philosophy were Immanuel Kant (1724-1804),
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) and Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Now we certainly don't have time to go into the nuances of
these thinkers' ideas. All I want to say here is that Hegel's influence, in particular, was decisive for
Marx, above all in one respect: his use of a dialectical approach, which sought to understand history
as the unfolding of contradictions that were fundamental to any given order – whether of state, or
civil society, or law, or art, or science. Each historical formation – whether of state, society, family,
law, or art – for Hegel, was eventually undermined by internal contradictions. New formations were
produced through the playing out of these contradictions and conflicts, which did not simply destroy
the old order, but retained its key elements, in a changed form.
Marx claimed to have stood Hegel on his head. Like others in his time, he argued that Hegel's
notorious conception of a World Spirit – or Idea, or Mind - whose internal contradictions
determined the movement of history, was false. Rather, he argued, it was the real development of
history and historical forces that needed to be deciphered, of which ideas – of freedom, justice,
democracy or whatever – were just a component. Here, Marx made a case for the primacy of social
relations: in each historical epoch (however you define an epoch), certain combinations of property
relations, social divisions, technological forces, and forms and methods of material production were
the key feature. In capitalist society, for instance, the emergence of the industrial bourgeoisie and
the industrial proletariat served (as he understood it) to sharply polarize social groups in a way that
could not be sustained in a stable way. Therefore, the clash between these opposing social classes
would be decisive in determining the future shape of society. All this flowed, it must be remembered,
from Marx's stress on human labour as the key ingredient in the social mix: labour, he argued, was
humanity's 'species-being', or essence. In other words, the capacity to produce, through a
combination of skill, effort and imagination, the material conditions of social existence (food, shelter,
transport, clothing, etc.) was the great distinguishing feature of human life. In one of his most telling
phrases, he described the class struggles around him as the conflict between dead or stored-up
labour (capital) and living, suffering labour.
Now this sort of reasoning could point, simultaneously, in two different directions. In some of his
formulations and writings, Marx used the historical dialectic in a rather mechanical way. In his early
text The German Ideology, for instance, he seems to sketch out a 'stage' theory of history (clearly
derived from 18th-century models), whereby contradictions in primitive society almost inevitably
produce the conditions for slavery, which in turn generates feudal society out of its own collapse.
Feudal society's contradictions implode and capitalism is formed, and in its turn socialism and
communism will follow. Marx even found a mechanism which, for him, explained this. The
development of the forces of production, he argued, are at each stage of history held back by
dominant relations of production, until the tension becomes unbearable. Now there are moments in
our own world, today, when this sort of reasoning can appear irresistible. Take the Internet, for
instance. We have information, knowledge, entertainment available, potentially, on an unheard-of
scale, crossing continents with the click of a button. At the same time, we have the world's biggest
monopolies being formed precisely in this sphere. And we clearly have a clash here – just think of
the desperate and rather hilarious advertisements warning against video piracy that you encounter
at the beginning of most DVDs you watch. Or think of the crises the traditional publishing industry
has been thrown into by new forms of online circulation. The Marxist point that can be derived from
this is that this is an inherently unstable situation and cannot last long: some sort of new order of
intellectual property, or, alternatively, of sharing, is going to result – we just don't know what it
might be. Or, to go back about five centuries, think of the early development of printing presses in
the West, which were so closely interlinked with momentous political and cultural changes. On the
other hand, Marx's own formulations about this seem to almost suggest some sort of trans-historical
mechanism that will inevitably repeat itself. Phrases like this, in the hands of many of his followers –
and on occasion in his own work – could act as formulae, blocking rather than enabling historical
enquiry.
But there's another way of reading Marx's 'dialectical method', if we focus on the huge importance
Marx placed on political struggle. As a general statement, the idea that all history is the history of
class struggle seems ridiculous and in many ways is – isn't there so much more to history? But what
this sort of conception also does is restore the importance of human beings and their conflicts over
material resources, ways of organizing production, ways of mobilizing and performing labour. It also
reminds us that the social formations which are sustained by particular combinations of property
relations, technology and social labour are never written in stone: they were the product of
particular historical moments and forces, and they come with an expiry date which, unfortunately, is
always smudged. Arguably the most striking instance of Marx's dialectics of history is the opening
th
section of his '18 Brumaire': 'Men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own
choosing.' Consider the movement of Marx's thought in these passages. He begins with a finely
calibrated relationship between human agency and external forces that impinge upon it, a tension
between freedom and necessity, which are both always present in historical development. He
develops this into a reflection on the ways in which the past haunts the present. But there's a twist
here: the past's impact is most pronounced where we would expect it to be weakest: precisely at
moments of profound, revolutionary historical change. Human beings, placed in a situation where
the possibilities seem endless and for that reason terrifying as well as exciting, falter before the
ghosts that rise up in front of them. Ghosts haunting people precisely as they set out to change
their circumstances; the dead weight of the past confronting the force of revolutionary change – this
might be another way of decoding Marx's historical dialectic.
To stay with the Brumaire for another moment, consider Marx's style of exposition. Here is a
passage towards the end of the text where Marx considers the meaning of the imperial restoration of
1851 that followed three years of republican ferment.
The French bourgeoisie balked at the domination of the working proletariat; it has brought the
lumpenproletariat to domination, with the chief of the Society of December 10 at the head. The
bourgeoisie kept France in breathless fear of the future terrors of red anarchy; Bonaparte
discounted this future for it when, on December 4, he had the eminent bourgeois of the Boulevard
Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens shot down at their windows by the liquor-inspired army
of order. It apotheosised the sword; the sword rules it. It destroyed the revolutionary press; its
own press has been destroyed. It placed popular meetings under police supervision; its salons are
under the supervision of the police. It disbanded the democratic National Guards; its own National
Guard is disbanded. It imposed a state of siege; a state of siege is imposed upon it […] It
transported people without trial; it is being transported without trial. It repressed every stirring in
society by means of the state power; every stirring in its society is being suppressed by means of
the state power. Out of enthusiasm for its purse, it rebelled against its own politicians and men of
letters; its purse is being plundered now that its mouth has been gagged and its pen broken.
We have a blisteringly, savagely ironical mode of analysis here. Each sentence contains a reversal or
negation: the instances are piled one on top of another. Contrary to the common notion that Marx
believed in some sort of neat straight-line teleology of historical development, this passage, along
with so many others in the text, demonstrates that for him history never moves in a straight line –
and yet its movement bears its own logic. What is the logic at work here? The French bourgeoisie,
according to Marx, is haunted by the prospect of a popular uprising led by the urban working class,
and fantasizes about a 'red terror' that would strip away its rights and privileges. The very attempt
to forestall this nightmare is politically the root of the Bonapartist restoration. And the profound
historical irony of the moment is that the very repression that the bourgeoisie had feared is
precisely what it faces – not at the hands of its enemies, but at the hands of its saviour. Later, Marx
will go on to talk about the way in which these events have laid the basis neither for a democratic
republic nor for a revamped monarchy – but, on the contrary, for a form of despotic bourgeois rule
based on the untrammeled power of an unprecedentedly modern state executive (bureaucrats and
police) over the legislature, and the people. Looking back upon very recent events, Marx performs a
precise set of operations on them: he slices them up into different periods and thus introduces a
chronology; he detects underlying patterns, and he relates them to deeper social forces of class
formation, economic development, political consciousness. For many, perhaps most, Europeans who
were Marx's contemporaries, the conflicts in France would have appeared, above all, as a
confrontation between monarchy and republic, royal houses and the popular will. Marx cuts through
these categories, shows how the unintended outcomes of the French events are more important
than the ideologies that dominated the period, and discloses a whole universe of causes,
motivations, and patterns beneath the apparent clash. Among other things, he furnishes us with a
very striking analysis of the emergence of modern state-forms, as one of the many possible
outcomes of this situation.
Another specifically Marxian approach to history can be adduced from Marx’s treatment of capital
and capitalist society – the subject that occupied his attention for most of his life. In several of his
writings, Marx writes of the ways in which economists, whose purpose is to explain price, profit,
rent, wages, etc. end up mystifying, and rendering invisible, the historical genesis of capital and
capitalist society itself. So a specific mode of material production and social organization is rendered
in quasi-natural terms, as though the market and its laws are some sort of immutable given of
human nature. In opposition to this, Marx sets out to uncover the actual historical development of
the forces which make up capitalist production. Capital, ground rent, interest and wage-labour
become products of particular historical circumstances, rather than trans-historical constants. The
aim here is to de-naturalize something normally taken as self-evident, and to relate it to deeper
social forces. So, for instance, in volume I of his magnum opus Capital, Marx reads the historical
development of the basic structures of capitalism through an extended historical account of
struggles over the working-day between employers and workers.
Let me turn to the 'legacies' of Marx's work for the historical profession at large. Here again it is
necessary to make certain key distinctions. Eric Hobsbawm is one of many who has pointed out that
a great deal of what came to pass for 'Marxism' in the twentieth century bore only a tenuous and
tangential relationship to Marx's own thought. So for instance, the study of peasant movements and
workers' movements by historians is generally – and certainly not falsely – attributed to the
influence of Marx. Yet it might be more accurate to see these as flowing from the social upsurges of
oppressed people through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of which Marx was merely the
most accomplished analyst. In other words, Marx left his imprint on these forms of social history,
but they may well have emerged without him as a result of the social and political processes that
have dominated modern history. Equally, the study of social and economic conditions, and socioeconomic bases of historical change, is clearly deeply interwoven with Marxist thought. But it also
has other sources: for instance, the social history associated with the Annales School in France,
which always maintained its distance from Marxism. For all that, however, these subjects of research
– so dominant for such a long time in twentieth-century social history – clearly owe some kind of
major debt to Marx: it is just not very easy to specify the size of this debt.
Hobsbawm makes another important distinction, between Marxism 'proper' and what he describes as
'vulgar-Marxism'. So what is this 'vulgar-Marxism'? Briefly put, it refers to a set of ideas many of
us will have encountered at one point or another, either in textbook renditions of Marxism or in the
works of its critics. These ideas, in no particular order, are: the determination of all life by the
economic sphere, the idea of historical inevitability (an inexorable succession of historical 'stages'
leading finally to the overthrow of capitalism); the notion that individuals and ideas are insignificant
in history; a literal reading of Marx's statement in the Manifesto that all history is 'the history of
class struggle', and so on. Now putting it in these terms makes it sound as though these are simply
ridiculous notions that hamper a 'true' Marxism somewhere out there. This is not Hobsbawm's aim:
his approach is more refined. He acknowledges that these ideas are full of holes; he also points out
that Marx was not, in a strong sense, an adherent to them – and that these constitute a misreading
of Marx as an implacable believer in historical destiny and economic determinism. It is possible to
cite dozens of passages where Marx himself provides strong antidotes to these ideas; it is also
possible to show that to a large extent these owe to late nineteenth-century positivist
interpretations of Marx, some of which were produced by Engels towards the end of his life. Equally,
and more disturbingly, it is possible to show that the influence of these ideas is tied up with the
subsequent history of Stalinism, and Stalin's utterly mechanical and lifeless approach to the
problems of Marxism. But Hobsbawm makes a crucial additional point. Precisely in these simplified
and vulgarized forms, he argues, these ideas contained concentrated dynamite that would 'blow up'
the historical profession in its orthodox form. All sorts of traditional versions of history – great-man
theories, the obsessive study of generals and wars at the expense of social relations – crumbled to a
large extent as a result of the assault of these 'vulgar-Marxist' ideas. Let me take just one instance
of this, an Indian example. In the 1930s and 1940s, a man named D.D. Kosambi literally
revolutionized the writing of ancient Indian history. Previous historians of ancient India had limited
themselves to the study of kings, emperors, empires and wars, often seeking a basis for Indian
nationalism in past glories. Kosambi changed the rules of the game, focusing on the fragmentary
evidence available for transformations of ancient social structures, using archaeological remains,
mythological texts, royal land grants, and numismatic studies of coins in combinations that were
utterly new and explosive, to build a flawed but hugely stimulating picture of ancient social
formations. Kosambi was driven to this sort of work squarely by his encounter with Marxism – and
that, too, Marxism of the most wooden and deterministic sort. Yet it's also important to remember
that in India and many other parts of the world, this 'vulgar-Marxism' produced its own unshakeable
orthodoxies, and turned into a barrier to serious critical thought.
There is, however, another kind of Marxist legacy in historical studies. Once again, this perhaps
owes less to Marx himself than to the twentieth-century intellectual fortunes of Marxism. This, in
brief, is the idea of reading history against the grain, the awareness that dominant historical
narratives are composed by winners, and drawing attention to those who lost out in the historical
process. For instance, peasants and artisans during the Industrial Revolution, pastoral and forest
communities in periods of agrarian expansion, movements for political and social change which were
crushed, or whose radical edge was blunted by the global development of capitalism. For a wide
range of historians, it is this Marxist tradition that has served as the most effective defence against
ideas that we encounter all around us and imbibe as common sense – the idea that the laws of the
market must determine all social life, for instance. One sort of philosophical basis for this was laid
by Walter Benjamin, who is the subject of a subsequent lecture in this module. Benjamin, in ways
which you'll read about in a few weeks, read history not as a flat record of 'what actually happened',
but as a tragic sequence of unrealized possibilities, movements that failed to happen, emancipatory
potentials that were snuffed out.
This mode of historical investigation was most concretely felt, arguably, in Britain. Here, it was
associated with a group of historians – Rodney Hilton, A.L. Morton, Christopher Hill, Eric
Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson being the most famous – who clustered together in a Historians'
Group set up in the late 1940s by the Communist Party of Great Britain. Consider their output.
Hilton wrote about medieval peasant uprisings like the Peasant War of 1381. Morton and Hill wrote
about the seventeenth-century English Revolution, and both of them focused on radical groups –
Levellers, Diggers and Ranters – who put forth substantive ideas of political democracy, economic
equality and common ownership, and sexual liberation – which were defeated in their own time.
Hobsbawm wrote pioneering studies of social banditry and guerrilla movements. The most dazzling
of this lot, Thompson, wrote about communities of working people whose resistance to the brutal
process of nineteenth-century industrialization left profound traces upon democratic and egalitarian
movements. Now all these historians – with the exception of Hobsbawm – broke decisively with the
Communist Party for its failure to condemn the horrors of Stalinism, once these were revealed
beyond a shadow of doubt in the 1950s. Thompson himself associated this 'humanist' kind of Marxist
history with a repudiation of Stalinist thought. Once again, matters are more complicated:
Thompson's first major work, a typically passionate and (equally typically) 900-page study of the
utopian socialist William Morris, was written when he was still very much a Communist 'true
believer', in the early 1950s. Another British Marxist historian, Raphael Samuel, provided perhaps
the best explanation of this when he argued that history provided 'the playground of the Communist
unconscious'. What this implies is that the democratic, libertarian and egalitarian impulses that
drove people like these to Marxism in the first place were crushed and repressed by the
authoritarian style, hierarchical functioning, and mechanical philosophy of the party they were
members of. The writing of history provided another sort of outlet for these energies. So we are left
with this curious fact: Marxist history, and Marxist ideas of history, provided both very rigid and
deterministic models of explanation and understanding, which evacuated history of human agency,
and the most profoundly libertarian, humanist counterweights to those models. This is a
contradiction that is perhaps appropriate for a theory of history whose great contribution is,
precisely, the study of contradictions.