This is the third installment of a continuing series that responds to Joseph Heath’s posts at his Substack, “In Due Course,” which explain what he understands as the sorry state, even the decline, of academic Marxism—what I’m inclined to see as a continuing presence if not a resurgence. In other words, where he sees the decline of academic Marxism, I tend to see its incorporation in the curriculum, and in the common sense of our time. Some of the comrades would call that co-optation. I prefer to celebrate it as the mainstream's acceptance of Marxist theories.
In Part 1, I salvaged the labor theory of value. In Part 2, I defended Marxist theories of economic crisis (a.k.a. the business cycle), partly on the grounds that such theories have deeply informed the development of economics as a discipline, under Keynesian auspices among others, partly on the grounds that I have put them to productive use in explaining both the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Here I take up the problem of “historical materialism.” Again, I quote Heath, then offer a rejoinder.
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“3. Historical materialism. The above two problems were sufficient to persuade most economists to abandon Marxism. But of course Marx was much more than just an economist, he was a vastly influential social theorist. In particular, he was one of the first to make a serious effort to explain why societies change over time, or why they exhibit progress. This was the essence of his ‘historical materialism,’ which differed from prevailing ‘idealistic’ accounts by claiming that it was the development of productive technology that served as the driving force of historical change. Although this shift in emphasis provided an important corrective to many older views, few people now consider Marx’s central claims about class conflict and base-superstructure relations to be literally correct.
“The first and most important setback to historical materialism stemmed from its failure to anticipate, or to offer a persuasive explanation for, the importance of nationalism in the 20th century. Marx categorized religion as an element of the superstructure, which could impede historical progress, but was not actually a moving part in the machinery of social change. (Max Weber famously cast doubt on this view.) Marxists were inclined to categorize nationalism the same way, and so were caught flat-footed by the ease with which working class solidarity could be fractured along national and ethnic lines. Furthermore, with respect to technological change, Marx focused entirely on the development of productive technology, and so had nothing to say about the role that changes in military technology played in human history. Indeed, Marx basically had no place for the military as a social actor in his account of historical development. Both of these omissions became rather glaring after the Second World War, which made Marx’s theory seem hopelessly inadequate.
“So while many social scientists continued to do work that was clearly influenced by historical materialism, the views that came to prevail incorporated many, many more moving parts than Marx’s (e.g. see Arthur Stinchcombe’s Economic Sociology, or Michael Mann’s The Sources of Social Power for a sample).”
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My rejoinder. As I understand it, this is a complaint against vulgar Marxism, which dresses up in the fancy phrase of “historical materialism” and boils down to economic determinism in explaining the history of human civilizations.
In Marxist dialect, at full speed: the “base,” which is composed of the material things like the plant and equipment that constitute the means or forces of production, determines the “superstructure,” which is composed of the immaterial stuff like ideas, laws, and expectations that constitute the social relations of production. (The ensemble of means/forces and relations is the mode of production.)
This genus of determinism contains many species, among them modernization theory and dependency theory, cognate systems devised to explain the stages of economic development and/or underdevelopment under colonial and/or imperialist regimes: the difference between them is only as much as their distance from their common origin in Marxist thinking, which grasps labor as “the essence of Man” and proceeds accordingly—to the fundamental insight that the way goods production is organized will shape the behavior of most people throughout history simply because human beings have no choice except to cooperate in extracting sustenance from the natural resources and the technological devices available to them at any given moment.
Marx wasn’t the first to ask the “transition question,” the original version of which was, how did feudalism give way to capitalism? The leading figures of the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment, among them David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith, were the path-breaking thinkers here, as Marx himself acknowledged. But Marx’s systematic answer—look for changes in the ways goods are produced, because the labor process, the “ever-lasting Nature-imposed condition of human life,” is where human nature creates and transforms itself—has become a kind of covering law in modern historical consciousness, and a merely conventional method in modern historical writing (see: the “new” social history, labor history, etc.). The original transition question has, in this sense, become the only question, for it asks us how we got from there to here, and get from here to there, as if it’s a practical question—as if “we,” ordinary people, can produce ourselves, actually make history.
So conceived, the vulgar variety of Marxism is itself a stage in both the development of historical consciousness and the articulation of Marxist theories, not the last or the only stage. Its residual or vestigial forms are still legible in the “structuralist” Marxism of Louis Althusser, et al., for example, where the economic is causative “in the last instance,” and in economic history (also theory), where the market revolution, or industrialization, or the rise of “big business,” typically gets treated as an event to which people responded or adjusted, not something they did.
This formulation, a faint echo of the base-superstructure model, runs counter to Marx’s own method, which consistently renders economic events as functions of social movements or change, which of course do not happen in the absence of ideas. Thus deployed, that method would disclose, say, immaterial expectations of and about equality as they are embedded in the American experiment as a force or a means of production as material in its effects as any plant or piece of equipment used in the production of goods. In such perspective, materialism and idealism no longer look like the terms of an either/or choice, nor ingredients of everyday life to be combined by the theorist in a “dialectical” recipe—because there are no economic transactions conducted without language, no things traded without thoughts.
But Heath somehow ignores the varieties of Marxism that developed over the last century in confrontation with economic determinism as animated by widely divergent political premises and purposes, which even at its most vulgar extremes, as per Walt Rostow’s anti-communist manifesto, has produced useful results (in the attenuated form of worship at the shrine of globalization, for example, which was supposed to produce familiarity with wage labor, market discipline, modern credit, and so forth, and thus acculturate the benighted indigenous populations to liberal, democratic political procedures and protocols).
Leave aside the business about nationalism, which derives, in any case, from Lenin’s sectarian polemics against the “revisionists” of the German SPD, Eduard Bernstein in particular, ca. 1903-1914, from “What Is To Be Done?” to Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Benedict Anderson’s work addresses this supposed aporia, anyway, and does so in a manner that derives from and accords with previous Marxist accounts of colonialism, imperialism, and revolution.
Heath totally ignores the fact that, like R. H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), Max Weber understood his project as the completion of the tasks set by the agenda of “historical materialism,” as Weber himself explained the purpose of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904, trans. 1930). Heath also ignores the fact that the great Marxist theorist Gyorgy Lukac—whose concept of “reification,” a variation on the theme of alienation, became the founding gesture of the Frankfurt School—was Weber’s student. (At about the same time, Keynes’s most prized student, Maurice Dobb, was becoming the most accomplished Marxist historian of his generation: see his still unsurpassed Studies in the Development of Capitalism [1946, rev. ed. 1963].)
The most glaring omission here, though, is the absence of Antonio Gramsci and his intellectual heirs in Heath’s account of Marxism since Marx. Gramsci’s retort to economic determinism, and for that matter to Leninist blueprints for revolution, has radically revised the meaning and significance of Marxism since translations of the Prison Notebooks began appearing (at about the same time that translations of Alexandre Kojeve’s seminar on Hegel began circulating), in the 1960s and 70s. A makeshift roster of social theorists, literary or cultural critics, and historians whose work has been decisively shaped by their encounter with Gramsci—who was in graduate school studying to become a linguist when he helped found the Italian Communist Party—would only begin with Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, John Cammett, Eugene D. Genovese, Tom Nairn, Perry Anderson, Louis Althusser, Antonio Negri, and, not least, Fredric Jameson. I’m sure I’ve left important names out.
And I don’t have space to wax eloquent about the British Marxists who founded Past & Present in 1952, among them Christopher Hill (Tawney’s heir apparent), Eric Hobsbawm, Edward Thompson, and Rodney Hilton, or the younger ones who soon after started New Left Review, or their American counterparts who re-invented the discipline of History in the 1960s and 70s, meanwhile founding Studies on the Left and several other journals, among them William Appleman Williams, Herbert Gutman, Martin J. Sklar, Warren Susman, Melvyn Dubofsky, and David Montgomery. Again, important names have no doubt gone missing.
And did I mention the advent of Marxist feminism in the 1970s and 80s? Or post-colonial and subaltern studies?
You can see where this is going. Marxism is an abiding presence in the precincts of academe and well beyond. Almost a half-century ago, Gertrude Himmelfarb complained that “we are all Marxists now.” She wasn’t just being her normal, paranoid, neo-conservative self. Marxism was then, and still is, a dimension of our core curriculum and our common sense.