(From LSHG Newsletter # 50, Autumn 2013)
In January Owen
Jones published an article in which he sharply criticised those “obsessed with replicating
a revolution that took place in a semi-feudal country nearly a century ago” and claimed that
“the era of Leninist party building surely ended a long time ago.”
There was a
rapid rebuttal from Alex Callinicos in Socialist Review, which denounced
“the mindless
repetition of a few sacred formulas” and argued that “genuinely carrying on a tradition
requires its continuous creative renewal”.
Callinicos’s
article provoked widespread comment, notably from John Riddell, who deployed
formidable erudition in his account of how “democratic centralism” functioned in
the early Comintern.
This is not the
place to discuss those debates, and certainly not the circumstances that gave
rise to them. But as socialist historians, we should be particularly concerned
by one theme underlying these
discussions, the question of how the study of history relates to political
practice.
The argument
against history is well known, summed up in Henry Ford’s famous remark
“History
is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live
in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the
history that we make today.”
[Chicago Tribune, 1916].
Owen Jones and
his mates in the Labour Party would probably go along with this. It is popular
with university managements, like those at Middlesex and London Met, which have
closed history departments. (Middlesex, which broke its links with the past in
2006, is now running a course for Asda managers, which consists of just twelve
days of classroom study in three years, plus online studies and work-based assessment.
For the left
such arguments have a superficial attractiveness. Surely we should start from
the concrete realities of our own time, not with memories of the past. The attitude
is summed up in George Galloway’s famous recommendation that we should “stop
talking about dead Russians”.
A recent manifestation is the claim that the
internet, and such phenomena as Facebook and Twitter, have changed everything
and opened up a totally new style of political activity.
In my view such
rejections of history should be forcefully countered. To begin with there is a simple logical
objection. This rejection of history, this claim that our world, in Yeats’s words,
is “all changed, changed utterly”, is itself a historical judgement. To make
any serious assessment of what exactly has been changed by the internet, we
need to look at the history of forms of communication from the blank semaphore telegraph of the
1790s, which so excited Babeuf and his comrades, through the electric
telegraph, radio and television to the internet. Only
such a historical analysis can provide a basis for a proper analysis of change and continuity.
It is well-known
that in revolutions those taking part frequently draw on models from the past.
The French revolutionaries of 1789 saw themselves as re-enacting the Roman Republic.
The Chartists often thought in terms of remaking the French Revolution. And in
the Russian Revolution there was frequent reference back to 1789 and to the
Paris Commune. Thus in his History
of the Russian Revolution Trotsky reminds us that the Bolsheviks, in
seizing the State Bank, were very much aware of the precedent of the Paris
Commune:
'Almost
simultaneously with the seizure of the Telephone Exchange a detachment of sailors
from the Marine Guard, about forty strong, seized the building of the State
Bank on the Ekaterininsky Canal. …. The seizure of the bank had to some extent
a symbolic importance. The cadres of the party had been brought up on the Marxian
criticism of the Paris Commune of 1871, whose leaders, as is well known, did
not venture to lay hands on the State Bank. ‘No we will not make that mistake,’
many Bolsheviks had been saying to themselves long before October 25. News of
the seizure of the most sacred institution of the bourgeois state swiftly spread through
the districts, raising a warm wave of joy.'
Such
retrospective identification was not always helpful. The confused debate about
the Soviet Thermidor
in the 1920s is a case in point. But it was inevitable. When human beings are
engaged in radically remaking the world, they can only conceive what they are doing
either in terms of pure imagination (like the Utopian socialists), or in terms
of what has been done in the
past. A proper understanding of the originality of a revolution’s achievements
can only be achieved after the event.
In the Eighteenth
Brumaire Marx noted the way in which revolutionaries constantly turn to the past:
'The tradition of
all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they
seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating
something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary
crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing
from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene
in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put
on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately
in the guise of the Roman Republic and the
Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody,
now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95.'
But he thought that the proletarian revolution could break with such backward-looking practices:
'The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content.'
But he thought that the proletarian revolution could break with such backward-looking practices:
'The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content.'
Undoubtedly Marx
was over-optimistic about the prospects for socialist revolution in the nineteenth century,
and hence underestimated the extent to which those involved in making socialist
revolutions would need to learn from the past. The younger Alex Callinicos, not
so weighed down
with the burden of defending the Marxist “tradition”, made some interesting comments on
these passages by Marx, considered together with Sartre, Benjamin and others. He
observed that
'historical materialism does not simply transcribe the pattern of
past struggles passively. It seeks to assimilate these experiences of these struggles
critically and reflectively.
Only such an appropriation of the past can produce historical knowledge ‘whose
pulse’, in Benjamin’s words, ‘can still be felt in the present’. For the point
of remembering past victories and defeats is to learn from them and to put
their lessons to work in the future.'
(A Callinicos, Making History,
Chicago, 2009, p. 264. The book was first published in 1987, and planned before
the miners’ strike of 1984-85.)
The study of
history is also relevant to a major problem in Marxist theory. The philosopher Georg Lukács put
forward the concept of “imputed consciousness”, that is, the consciousness of
which the working class is potentially capable, rather than that which it has at any
particular point in time:
'By relating
consciousness to the whole of society it becomes possible to infer the thoughts and
feelings which men would have in a particular situation if they were able to
assess both it and the interests arising from it in their impact on immediate
action and on the whole structure of society. …. Now class consciousness
consists in fact of the appropriate and
rational reactions ‘imputed’ (zugerechnet) to a particular typical
position in the process of production. This consciousness is, therefore, neither
the sum nor the average of what is thought or felt by the single individuals
who make up the class. And yet the historically significant actions of the
class as a whole are determined in the last resort by this consciousness
and not by the thought of the individual - and these actions can be understood
only by reference to this consciousness.'
(G. Lukács, History
and Class Consciousness, London, 1971, p 51.)
Now this notion
of “imputed consciousness” is both essential and problematic for Marxism. Essential,
because unless it can be shown that the working class is capable of a radically
different consciousness than that which it has at present, then any hope of the
self-emancipation of the proletariat is vain. Yet problematic because of the
vexed question of who does the
“imputing”. Is there some elite vanguard that knows better than the working class itself
what the class should be thinking?
The educator must be educated, but
who imputes the imputer? The only way out of this dilemma is to show what the
working class is potentially
capable of by study of what it has achieved in the past. If we’re asked how we know
that the working class could run society for itself, the only answer that is
both intellectually
sound and plausible in debate is one that cites the Paris Commune, the Russian soviets,
Budapest 1956, Nantes 1968 and Portugal 1975. The left needs more historians and fewer
philosophers.
Of course all
the experiences referred to are partial. The working class has never held on to power for very
long. But that is a problem that lies at the very heart of the historical
process. There are no guarantees; the future is socialism or barbarism,
successful revolution or “the common ruin of
the contending classes”. And it was the period of the Russian Revolution and
its aftermath that showed the highest level of working-class struggle yet known
to human history. The
successful proletarian revolution in Russia was followed by a wave of strikes, mutinies
and the formation of workers’ councils throughout Europe. Germany came to the
very brink of revolution, while Italy, France, Spain and Britain also saw
massive struggles. The formation of the Communist International brought
together various currents of the left and offered hope to millions of workers
that there would be no return to the system that had produced the
catastrophic World War. That’s why, doubtless to Owen Jones’s great chagrin, some of us will
go on talking about Lenin and other dead Russians for some time to come.
At present we
face the challenge of Michael Gove trying to manipulate the teaching of history
in the interests of the social order he defends. Teachers and indeed all of us
should fight Gove’s plans. But we should be clear that no government will
provide the kind of historical education we need. The left needs to assume its
responsibility for the historical study, research and popularisation that is central
to its project. We need more bodies like the London Socialist Historians Group.
The recent Matchwomen’s Festival at the Bishopsgate Institute showed what can
be done with imagination and a non-sectarian approach. The historical process
includes the future as well as the past, and without history we have no future.
Ian Birchall
