The Historical Method
|
|
A Historiography of Historical Materialism
|
|
|
|
Joshua J.
Morris
|
|
3/31/2014
|
|
Word
Count: 7798
|
Preface: A Note on Form
This is a historiography of a
philosophical method for history. Rather
than simply a topic of history, it unveils the history of a method through the works of its key
influences. It should go without saying that any analysis
of historical method from a materialist, let alone dialectical, standpoint is
inevitably going to cross philosophical paths with those of others. In acceptance of this very valid truth, it is
necessary to explain the purpose of form for this historiography. To explain the history of dialectical theory,
it is necessary that one experience it; as such, this historiography will
present history as an unfolding sequence of material relationships and their
idealistic, or metaphysical, components.
There is no hiding the fact that this presentation of history is
invariably divided against an opposing view.
We will proceed from antiquity
to so-called ‘modernity’; tracing the development of the idea of social progress simultaneously with the development of historical method. This we will do rather quickly. We will see how the latter proceeds slower than
the former and yet, by the 20th century, the former proceeds to
express the latter. We will observe the
inversion of the Hegelian dialectic, the transformation of theory into Marx’s
magnum opus Das Kapital, the
synthesis of action and philosophy into a social science by Lenin, and finally
the evolution of theory separated from practice throughout the 20th
century.[2]
In following the tradition of “a
ruthless criticism of everything,”[3]
this analysis seeks to show the materialist conception of history as an idea and its ongoing relevance as a
contemporary historical method of
world history. As such, no consideration
will be given to alternative theories and their various charges against
concepts like Marxism, materialism, and world-systems analysis. The central argument, or thesis, of this
historiography is that historical materialism was the first genuine world history. As such, this essay argues that historical
materialism is the foundation of a scientific approach to history, and the
means to incorporating the social sciences into a more uniform discipline. It is from the position that historical materialism
is world history that we begin our
analysis.
Part 1: The origin of the Idea and Materialism
In his famous depiction of a
utopian society, Plato outlined what some have described as a primitive form of
intellectual communism mid-way through his magnum opus, The Republic.[4] Plato depicted “guardians of the state” as
servants to philosopher-kings whose rule was done in the name of justice and
wisdom. A central feature of all these
guardians, according to Plato, was that “none of them have property of their
own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private
house or store closed against anyone who has the mind to enter.”[5] These servants of the Republic guarded the
sacred trust between the philosopher-kings and their ruled subjects. Plato described what was, in his mind, the
ideal expression of governance; that is, governance of the wise, for the
ignorant. In doing so, Plato also
outlined one of the earliest depictions of what one might call a political ideal. Because of this, among many other idealist
components to The Republic,[6]
Plato is usually credited with being the father of idealist (or Platonic)
philosophy.
Plato also played a central part
in the development of the concept of a dialectic. A dialectic, strictly, refers to the ‘Socratic
Dialog’ in which two participants are able to resolve the conflict of a debate
through reasoned discourse. The goal of
a constructive dialectic, in the mind of Plato, is to arrive at a synthesis of ideas; where the positive
components of two alternative ideas manage to outweigh their negative
differences. Of course, Plato points
out, this process is rare. Plato
criticized his fellow students for abandoning dialectic and instead simply
listening to lectures, for in doing so they merely passively accepted the
instruction of someone else, as opposed to actively engaging with knowledge.[7]
Plato’s role in the development
of Greek philosophy typically outshines the development of materialist
philosophy, which occurred around the same time, between 480-425 bce. Known as both “the father of history” and
“the father of lies,” Greek historian Herodotus typically merits the honor of
writing one of the first history texts: The Histories. It is here where Herodotus made one of his
most famous statements on the relationship of people to their society: “Circumstances rule men, men do not rule
circumstances.”[8] Herodotus’ depiction of society asserted that
individuals are slaves to a larger system around them, a system that both
defines and confines the mental and physical expressions of society as a
whole. Along with Aristotle, who
questioned Plato’s idealistic portrayal of form
over content, Herodotus’ works are
considered to be among the foundations of materialist (sometimes called realist,
Aristotelian, or physicalist) philosophy.
Whereas for Plato history was merely a categorization of ideas, for
Herodotus, history was a systemization and categorization of material.
The idealist and materialist
camps of philosophy created divergent views on all forms of social development,
from politics to agriculture to religion.
The summation of their debates and conclusions is best exemplified by
what is called the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem is a specific debate
between idealist and materialist philosophy, but in many ways it contains the
totality of the worldview that separates each camp. In its most simplified form, the debate is
merely over mind versus matter. It
became a central issue to philosophical debates under the criticism of
Descartes in his text Meditations on
First Philosophy. There, Descartes
depicted a uniform dualism that
asserted the primacy of neither materialist nor idealist views but rather the
dual functioning of mental activity with physical action. It was Descartes’ dualism that revitalized
the mind-body debate by offering a third alternative. Afterward, all forms of mind-body debates
became split into two new categories: a dual reality and a mono reality.[9]
By the time of the
Enlightenment, the so-called rationalists
brought back an extreme appreciation for idealist philosophy (as did Descartes’
writings), with the cornerstone of reason being the reification of liberty;
that is, freedom in its most ideal sense.
But the philosophical Enlightenment also gave way, as many Eurocentric
historians have argued, to the development of a European hegemonic power in
economic trade. More accurately, the
Enlightenment coincided with
transformations occurring in agriculture, specifically textile industries in
various regions such as China, India, Mongolia, the Middle East, Egypt, and
Italy. Nevertheless, the resurgence of
idealism coincided with an increasing attempt by secular (by that I mean,
non-religious) groups to attempt to rationally explain the world. Immanuel Wallerstein describes this process
in his introductory text, An Introduction
to World-Systems Analysis:
Philosophers lent themselves to this task,
insisting that human beings could obtain knowledge by using their minds in some
way, as opposed to receiving revealed truth through some religious authority or
script. Such philosophers as Descartes
and Spinoza….were both seeking to relegate theological knowledge to a private
corner, separated from the main structures of knowledge.[10]
In this way,
academia, emerging out of the medieval period, opened up a rational challenge
against irrational claims. But this did
not occur in just one fashion, as no development in history is singular,
absolute, and self-defined.
A second group of scholars
similarly rejected the irrational claims of theological philosophy, but
insisted on an approach of empirical
study as opposed to simply rational thinking. This group, which eventually became known as
scientists, emerged within academic and political circles to derive at
conclusions based on observational study.
To be sure, elements of reason and theory were still present; throughout
the 17th and 18th centuries, science and the humanities
were not sharply at odds with one another.
But, as many historians have noted, including Wallerstein, there came to
be a “divorce” between humanities’ emphasis on rational thinking and science’s
emphasis on empirical study.[11] It is here where we move into the first major
text in the historiography of historical materialism as a modern form of historical study[12],
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
Part II: The Early Historiography, Hegel to Marx
Part of Georg W. Hegel’s main
purpose in writing Phenomenology of
Spirit was to respond to this ongoing debate and division among academics
between rationalist and scientific camps.
While the totality of Hegel’s work is usually considered his magnum
opus, his preface typically obtains considerable attention by scholars both
during his time and afterward. It is
here where a unique correlation between Descartes’ dualist rationalism and the
theological pre-supposition of “the spirit” manifest a new way of understanding
social relationships and the diverse development of thought. According to Hegel, “the systematic
development of truth in scientific form can alone be the true shape in which
truth exists.” Philosophical truths,
including historical ones, can inherently benefit from a systematic development in a form that can only be described as
“scientific.”[13] Hegel acknowledges the legitimacy of science
simply by its actualization and reification among scholars. As such, Hegel tells us that the duty of
philosophy is to explain this necessity that drives knowledge toward empirical
study. Hegel’s challenge was for
philosophers to take up the reins of commanding a more active, practical form
of philosophy. And of course, Hegel
gives plenty of reasons for why this failed to occur up to that point.
Hegel attributed “argumentative
thinking” to the negative discourse that developed between philosophy and
science, particularly the kind that resulted in what he described as a
“Bacchanalian revel.” The problem with
argumentative debates, for Hegel, was their characteristic feature of
refutation. Argument “adopts a negative
attitude towards the content apprehended; knows how to refute it and reduce it
to nothingness.”[14] The obviously problems is that “to see what
the content is not is merely a
negative process; it is a dead halt, which does not of itself go beyond
itself.”[15] This reductionist logic is essentially as
vain and meaningless as the content it tries to refute. On the other hand, a dialectical discourse
contains a constructive form of negation:
the negation of the negative qualities of ideas in preference for their
positives. Whereas the argument seeks to
negate ideas while not positing an alternative, dialectic seeks to arrive at a
synthesis through negation. All this discussion of argument versus
dialectic causes Hegel to explain the “nature of philosophical truth and its
method” up to the early 19th century:
The truth is thus a Bacchanalian revel, where
not a member is sober; and because every member no sooner becomes detached that
they collapse straightaway, the revel is just as much a state of transparent,
unbroken calm.[16]
The problem of
truth, for Hegel, was that different groups of individuals arrived at different
paths to obtaining the truth and as
such asserted the primacy of their path over others. Regardless of the differences in path
however, Hegel believed that they all led to the same ultimate end, the
absolute idea, which leads to social change.
Visual Depiction of the Hegelian Dialectic[17]
Overall, Hegel’s contribution to
the historiography should be considered the bedrock, or the foundation upon
which historical materialism then begins its own process of development. Marx himself, in his younger years from
1825-1850 is typically considered a young
Hegelian, resulting from his emphasis in philosophy as a student and his
subsequent Hegelian influences. From
Hegel’s influences, we draw two main conclusions. For one, we get the notion of “alienation”
that results from the aforementioned “revel.”
Secondly, we get the importance of dialectical discourse and thought, as
opposed to reductionist argument. This creates
the basis for understanding the importance of a unifying method for
understanding history and ideas.
Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right serves
as a good bridge between Hegelian alienation and dialectics to the more
materialist take on such concepts.
Written in 1843, Marx responded to his Hegelian teachings by presupposing
the radical viewpoint of a revolution based on class. Following this piece, historical materialism holds
agency as a theory to be ‘actualized’ by the masses, which turns it into a
driving force of causality in Marx’s next text. The influences of Hegel are
present throughout the text, particularly Marx’s insistence on the notion of heaven being the abstracted (or
alienated) utopia present in the mind (something that everyone relates to in
one way or another). The materialist
critique on the abstraction appears in the first few paragraphs:
The basis of all irreligious criticism is
this: man makes religion, religion does
not make man. Religion is indeed man’s
self-consciousness and self-awareness so long as he has not found himself or
has lost himself again.[18]
Marx’s
criticism, put very simply, was that the very concept Hegel used to depict a component of his ‘absolute idea’
existed historically only because of man’s existence. The notion that absolute truth could exist
separated from mankind and social history met a challenge in Marx’s reasoning.
The
element of historic agency arrives in later paragraphs, deriving from
differences between nations and their social relations:
In France and England the problem is put in
the form; political economy or the rule of society over wealth. in Germany
it is put in the form; national economy
or the rule of private property over
nationality. Material force can only
be overthrown by material force; but theory itself becomes a material force
when it has seized the masses.[19]
Thus, for Marx,
a world historical theory is one that retains the capacity to become a
material, driving force in society once it has been acquiesced, or actualized
by the masses. This ‘actualization’
occurs through the struggled dialectic held between history’s “passive
element[s]”(class relationships) and its “material basis.”[20]
Marx’s
criticism was part of a broader effort first emphasized by Ludwig Feuerbach,
another young Hegelian from Germany. Feuerbach,
who was a direct student of Hegel, wrote his most influential work The Essence of Christianity in
1841. Feuerbach and his materialist
writings on Hegelian philosophy illustrate the connection between Hegel and
Marx because of the inversion of Hegel’s emphasis on historical ideals into
Marx’s emphasis on historical social and material relations.[21] As the cliché phrase goes, Marx ‘stood Hegel
on his head’: ideas became material relationships, theses and antitheses became
the struggle of these relationships, and syntheses became social progress
leading to communism, the absolute
material. By revealing the materialist
narrative of history, Marx made a considerable contribution to the concept we
now call world history; a history
that incorporates vast systems of relationships across temporal stages beyond
the decade, the century, and the lifetime of a nation.
By 1845, Marx’s disagreements
with other young Hegelians culminated into his work The German Ideology, a major component of which was the preface Theses on Feuerbach. Marx’s purpose in writing both the preface
and the main text itself was to critically respond to “hithero existing
materialism” by designating attempts to understand reality without observation
of human activity and practice as “purely a scholastic question.”[22]
For Feuerbach and his contemporaries, best depicted in Essence of Christianity, theoretical thinking is regarded “as the
only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in
its dirty-judacial manifestation [sic].”[23] The
German Ideology became the culmination, or synthesis, of Marx’s previous
conclusions on Hegelian dialectics and his criticism of Feuerbach’s crude
materialism. The text’s main feature is
the separation of mankind from the animal kingdom by definition of a few
specific traits, such as utility of tools, reproduction of daily life, and
social structures. Some might consider
the separation of humanity from nature to be an act of idealism, but Marx
merely isolated the fundamental difference between human and animal activity, which is work or labor versus
survival. In studying this process of
survival, we obtain a perspective of history with a simple materialist root. Engels later described the text as the
propositional start of the “materialist conception of history” in which “the
production of the means to support human life…..is the basis of all social
structures.”[24] Humans work
in order to survive, as opposed to
seeing work as just a general
activity of human beings. Thus Marx’s
materialism isolated itself from the other young Hegelians in that it was historical, and it envisioned a history
of society on a grand scale and defined by its various material components;
specifically the relationships between social components. By 1846, historical, or dialectical,
materialism had a theoretical framework with theory as the agent within
historical development.
But
what about causality? For Marx, coinciding
with this trait of survival within human civilization was the division of
society into two distinct social camps based on how (and ultimately if)
individuals work to reproduce themselves on a daily basis. Marx calls this social division the “division
of labor” between those who produce
and those who exploit. Marx points to the concept of property
ownership as the material manifestation of this social division, with its roots
in the end of feudalism around the 16th century.[25] Throughout The German Ideology, Hegelian influences present themselves as the
duality of Marx’s unique materialism.
The division of labor, a material phenomenon, provided Marx with the
central component to causality in history, class. Althusser commented on Marx’s assessment of
causality:
Whereas classical theories
of causality have only two models, linear (transitive, mechanical) causality,
which only describes the effects of one element on another, and expressive
(teleological) causality, which can describe the effect of the whole on the
parts, but only by making the latter an ‘expression’ of the former, a
phenomenon of its essence, Marxist theory introduces a new concept of the
effect of the whole on the parts, structural, complex causality, where the
complex totality of the structure in dominance is a structure of effects with present-absent causes. The cause of
the effects is the complex organization of the whole, present-absent in its economic,
political, ideological and knowledge effects.[26]
Ruling
classes, those groups who manage to retain control over labor forces through
property ownership, also present themselves as the intellectual rulers of
society. As such, in order to support
itself and the arrangement of classes as they were, the state mystifies the
relationships of society between the individual and the collective and places
the laboring class (which Marx here first refers to as the proletariat) into a false consciousness of alienation.[27] The conclusion to get out of Marx’s German Ideology is the interconnected
relationships that form what we call society,
and how class is prime causality in a materialist history. Just like Hegel’s dialectic of thought, with
Marx’s social dialectic we obtain a visual breakdown of society.
The
last major work to examine for the early historiography of historical
materialism is the text that Marx left us as the archetype, the blueprint: Das
Kapital. To be sure, there is a
multitude of texts and writings between The
German Ideology, published in 1845, and Das
Kapital, published in 1867. Those
familiar with Marx will know that we skipped arguably his most famous text, The Communist Manfiesto (1848). The purpose for going directly to Das Kapital is to more concisely address
product of his observations.
Das Kapital is a contribution to the
historiography in two ways: For one, it
presents a materialistic outlook on social activity and defines its development
by its dialectical history. History is
the key component that separates Marx’s economic conclusions from that of other
economists of his and present day.
Secondly, Das Kapital
presented its argument in a dialectical format.
This is the key feature of Das
Kapital: its use of historical study and economic discourse in conjunction
to form an overall assessment of social relations within a capitalist
society. Usually the text is cited as
the best resource for understanding values and exploitation within capitalism,
but this overshadows the theoretical importance of the text. Though Marx never wrote his magnum opus on
the philosophy of historical materialism, we see its method laid out in Das
Kapital. The single element in
society, the commodity, is shown to have a direct connection with the survival
and ongoing existence to the individual, which is then shown to have a direct
connection with the survival and ongoing existence of human society in
general. This dialectic is no longer Hegelian, in the sense that it is no
longer concerned exclusively with the realm of thought. Rather, Marx now used the dialectic to
explain material transformations in
society which are themselves the defining
elements of society. The production
of surplus-values, class structures, and property ownership became isolated as
the features which determine the degree to which a society is ‘modern’ in the
19th century sense.
Das Kapital’s form resulted from Marx’s
experience in observing the American Civil War through newspaper accounts and
public speeches.[29] In a now-famous letter to Arnold Ruge, Marx
explained his need to “demolish everything” in order to properly explain his
economic conclusions. Central to this
was the organization of the text into its dialectical shape, as well as the
inclusion of a new chapter that became a defining feature of Marx’s outlook on
social change. Chapter 10, The Working Day, illustrated the
breakdown of the workday into a period value production, and surplus-value
production. For Marx, surplus-values are
“the amount [of money] by which the value of the product exceeds the value of
its constituent elements.”[30] Money, a commodity whose value is determined
solely by its exchangeability, is given to the individual in exchange for his
labor, a commodity whose value is determined solely by its usefulness. Ultimately, as Marx depicts in Chapter 10, by
attempting to shorten the workday while keeping wages relative or increased,
the individual laborer is actually “robbing the capitalist.”[31] Volumes II and III of the text, published
after Marx’s death, also do a good service to extending the materialist
analysis to deeper levels of production.
The text has come into criticism since the 1950s with respect to the
Labor Theory of Value, and Marx’s reliance on it. This creates some limitations in using Das Kapital as a primary text, and
necessitates the expansion of research into other works.[32] Most essential to Marx’s work is the positing
of a social dialectic and its internal contradictions, which unveil the
un-static nature of capitalist economies, shown below:
A
good companion read to Das Kapital
that helps to explain its argument on the method
for resisting and depicting such a society is Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific. At the time of Das Kapital’s publication, Marx’s
historical materialism had received both praise and criticism, particularly
within the growing camp of political activists who identified themselves as
socialists. Engels’ document helps to
explain the connection between Marx’s assertions about society, and the
Hegelian insistence on a scientific, or logical approach to philosophy. The problem with a non-materialist,
non-scientific approach to socialism, in Marx and Engels’ view, was that it
merely created “utopian pictures of ideal social conditions” where “all
humanity at once” became emancipated as opposed to a shift from one class’ rule
to another. In its most abstracted
metaphor, the utopian approach to socialism attempts to create “Heaven from the
Earth.”[34] Thus Das
Kapital presents an argument in direct contrast with the utopian approach
by utilizing a systematic and scientifically historical breakdown of capitalist
society into its various components, and expose the hidden secrets of exchange
and production in a logical manner. World history, in a sense, is presented as
the history of capitalism. The
integration of historical analysis, materialist criticism, and Hegelian
concepts of alienation create the foundation of the text, and ultimately
isolate it as the magnum opus of
historical materialist methodology.
Marx’s
work ends the early historiography of historical materialism. In the post-Marx period, from Lenin onward,
historical materialism took on new shapes and adapted new interpretations. Without Marx to guide the development of the
idea, historical materialism was bequeathed to the next generation for
implementation. Thus the early
historiography is separated from the latter by the simple fact that the early
historiography is for the most part a craft of German thought, moving from Hegel
to Feuerbach to Marx. The latter
historiography extends into larger realms of world history as historical
materialism grew in acceptance as a methodology and a practice following the
success of the Russian revolution. Another
difference between these areas of the historiography is the various divisions
of thought that began to influence the philosophy. As such, it should be understood that there
is much sourcework left out here. It
would simply be too large of an undertaking to attempt to assess all
contributions to Marxist materialism, so key works have been chosen based on
the assertions they make and the parallelism between their analysis and
historical materialism’s methodology.
Finally, many of these theories developed in tandem with one another,
and as such they did not necessarily benefit from being well versed in each
others’ particular fields of study and approach. Rather, they should each be seen as a shade
of grey to make up the totality of what we might now call the materialist conception of history.
The Latter Historiography: Leninism and post-Marxism
V.I. Lenin’s seminal work on historical
materialism was Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism. Central to
Lenin’s argument was that the “Machians”, or Lenin’s Russian contemporary
critics of Marx and Engels, failed to assess history accurately because they
lacked an understanding of dialectics and materialism. Much of Lenin’s conclusions derive from the
influences of a German tanner and contemporary of Marx, Joseph Dietzgen. As opposed to rejecting their situation, individuals
“learn by experience,” which “in the words of Kant, passes beyond the bounds of
all experience.”[35]
Absolute truth is, thus, beyond the immediate experience, while the immediate
experience produces a relative truth.
The problem with the Machians, for Lenin, was that their “unhealthy
mysticism [of experiences] unscientifically separates the absolute truth from
the relative truth.” The experience of
the individual cannot be negated, and all individuals retain the capacity to
accurately reflect the actual, absolute and objective world around them in a
relative manner. In the latter part of
the text, Lenin spends a hefty amount of time responding to various arguments
and charges made against Marx for being a “metaphysicst.”[36] What we ultimately get out of Lenin’s work is
the notion that historical materialism is a social science, one that is both
scientific in its methodology and rational in its theoretical form. Most importantly, the subject by which the
social scientist can understand society through this method, is the individual
and their experiences relative to others.
Overall, Lenin’s contribution to the historiography gives us the
understanding that in a society divided by class, historical materialism is the
most effective form of social science.
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism laid the foundation for Lenin’s
approach to dialectical theory, and thus its eventual application during the
Russian revolution. His final published
piece, his Last Testament, contained
Lenin’s final thoughts on the application of theory following revolution. Written as a series of formal statements to
the Soviet Central Committee, Lenin criticized his fellow comrades for failing
to recognize that “the apparatus [they] call [their own] is, in fact, still
quiet alien; it is a bourgeois and tsarist hotch-potch and there has been no
possibility of getting rid of it in the course of the past five years.” Directly criticizing Stalin’s
“nationalist-socialism,”[37]
Lenin disagreed with the concept of uniform totality and the growing acceptance
of socialism’s very meaning reduced to Communist Party leadership. His
criticism made a powerful resurgence in the early 1940s by humanist philosopher
Raya Dunayevskaya, at the time a Trotskist, in her article The Union of Soviet Socialists Republics is a Capitalist Society. Moreso than the content of her text was the
implication it made in terms of the materialist conception of history; namely
that specific forms of movements in
practice resulted in an alienation from theory.
For the Soviet form, according to Dunayevskaya, the problem lay in their
abstraction of private versus state property:
The determining factor in analyzing the class
nature of a society is not whether the means of production are the private property of the capitalist class
or are state-owned, but whether the means of production are capital, that is, whether they are
monopolized and alienated from the direct producers.[38]
Dunayevskaya
laid out the theoretical framework of state-capitalism,
a form of capitalism whereby the state has assumed control and power over the
production of surplus-values. The “class
nature of the Soviet Union” explained the existence of surplus-values, and thus
negated the practical application of historical materialism. She asks:
“How does the mode of production differ under bureaucratic state
socialist rule from that under capitalist rule?”[39] It is not the political group in power that
determines the social relations of society, Dunayevskaya asserts, but rather
the “economic law of motion.”[40]
Dunaevskaya essentially charged the
Soviet Union with a false revolution, in a similar manner that was done by Marx
in his criticisms of the French Republic published as The Civil War in France in 1871.
In doing so she also confined the material limitations of what a social
revolution actually entails.
The last major work from
Dunayevskaya to consider as a contribution to the historiography is Philosophy and Revolution, published in a
second edition in 1989 shortly before her death. Dunayevskaya’s text was a collection of her
unpublished essays on the concept of “returning to Hegel.” Part of the purpose for attempting to
re-emphasize Hegel rested on Dunayevskaya’s life-long struggle to ‘rescue
Marxism’ from the stain of Stalinism.
Dunayevskaya isolated three essays, Alienated
Labor, Private Property and Communism
and Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right that “marked the birth of a philosophy of human activity, an
integrality of philosophy and economics destined to be known as Marxism.”[41] The limitations of Soviet ‘Diamat’, in her
view, was its submission to the reduction of “the very concept of socialism…to
the concept of state property, state plan.”[42] Both the Stalinist and Trotskist camps that
extended their ideological frameworks from Russia, despite their differences on
“the question of leadership” after the revolution, accepted the political success of the Bolshevik Party
as the origin of the existence of socialism in Russia. Additionally, she responds to growing
concerns about historical materialism’s inability to account for the conflict
and social struggle of gender.
Dunayevskaya’s work remains one of the most radical criticisms of Soviet
Marxism in general, namely that both of its hyper-polarized ideological camps
contain the same root origin. As a
contribution to the historiography, she reminds us that determinist politics
and economics has no place in the materialist conception of history.
In the late 1920s and early
1930s, philosopher and historian Herbert Marcuse attempted to consolidate
Martin Heidegger’s existentialism and the materialist conception of history
with three essays, published together as Heideggerian
Marxism. At the time, the growing
existentialist movement in Western philosophy threatened to uproot the Marxist
agency of class. During the writing,
Marcuse switched from Heidegger to Hegel as his master thinker of philosophy.[43] The problem with Heidegger, and thus
existentialism in a broader sense, was how he portrayed social life as
“relegated to inauthenticity” which thus “cuts off the possibility of a
critique of actual social relations.”[44] For Marcuse, this false abstraction failed
“to capture and carry within [itself] the concreteness of human life.”[45] Some have called Marcuse’s interest in
Heidegger as an attempt to unveil the “subjective dimension” of Marxist
analysis[46],
but others have suggested that Marcuse discovered in the young-Marx a
conception of labor that was “an ontological category of dialectical
historicity.”[47] The real value in Marcuse’s contribution was
his emphasis on the importance of the younger, more Hegelian Marx whose
“conception of human-sensuous activity”[48]
was more dominant than in his later works.
This notion of a return to Hegel,
we will see, is not unique to ongoing development of world historical
materialism in the post-WWII era.
Fernand Braudel’s Capitalism and Material Life and his
essays on historical theory examine the economic structures of capitalism in
Europe from 1400-1800. Braudel expanded
on Marx’s more narrow view of society by questioning the differences between
material and economic life. Braudel
emphasizes how “material life, consisting of very old routines, inheritances
and successes, is there at the root of everything.”[49] Braudel describes material life as “a series
of replications,” the central most one being the replication of society itself.
“Economic life,” on the other hand,
exists in a “wider radius,” particularly because we start dealing with multiple
“material lives” within the framework of a single “economic life.”[50] Braudel thus sets forth the task of trying to
explain this term of capitalism
utilizing a method of world historical analysis made famous in his larger work The Mediterranean. For Braudel we must move beyond the scope of
the 18th and 19th centuries if we are to understand the
economic life of capitalism.
Braudel’s
method focuses on what he calls the longue
durée, which portrays history “as a long duration” of events connected by
networks of exchange[51]. Braudel’s language of history, and his
emphasis on economic materialism, portrays a materialist conception of history without an emphasis on class. The problem with historians, including
Marxists, according to Braudel is “their preference [to go] instinctively toward
the short term.” Braudel gives credit
for the longue durée to Marx himself:
Marxism is peopled with models. Sartre would rebel against the rigidity and
the schematic nature…[and] I would rebel with him, though not against the
model, but rather against the use which has been made of it, the use which it
has been felt proper to make. Marx’s
genius, the secret of his long sway, lies in the fact that he was the first to construct true social models, on the basis of
the historical longue durée.[52]
Braudel’s
acceptance of Marxist social models as the basis for the longue durée illustrates his desire to unify these models into a
general theory of world history. The key contribution to get out of Braudel’s
work is the depiction of capitalist social relations on a world scale, with all
of its material components extrapolated beyond the nation-state and into the
framework of world history. When one
considers, as some have pointed out[53],
that Marx’s thought was limited to that of the 19th century where
the nation-state remained a dominant and coercive element to social thought,
Braudel’s work brings the materialist conception of history to a more worldly
level in the post-WWII era.
Almost directly resulting from
Braudelian influences, the works of Immanuel Wallerstein form an essential
contribution to historical materialism by reorienting the materialist analysis
of history and social relations into a structural model. His major works, The Modern World System Vol. I-III and Historical Capitalism is what we will consider here. Central to all of Wallerstein’s works is the
model of the “world-system,” a social hierarchy of geopolitical regions defined
by their relationship to production and framed over the Braudelian longue durée of the 16th
century to the present. To Wallerstein,
capitalism is a “world system” because “it is larger than any
juridically-defined political unit” and “because the basic linkage between the
parts of the system is economic.”[54] Because of its material history, capitalism
is also a hegemonic world-system that historically uprooted previous forms of
social relations, such as those in India, China, and the Middle East. The concept of dependency is thus also central to Wallerstein’s portrayal of
capitalism, and extends from Latin American dependencia
or ‘dependency theory’ studies.
Overall, we get a portrayal of capitalism on the world stage broken up
into three zones of dependency and the inter-relations of exchange between them: Core, peripheral, and semi-peripheral zones.
For Wallerstein, the most
critical aspect of capitalist society is its nature as a historical system, one
that requires us to step into the larger stage of world history. To examine it in short periods, or eras
defined by geographic localities, fails to explain the overall totality of
relations within a historical system, which can typically exist beyond the geographic
and temporal boundaries of nation-states.
Utilizing the system’s history we can avoid “a set of abstract
statements…to judge and classify reality.”
A historical, materialist approach however “describes what capitalism
has actually been like in practice, how it has functioned as a system, why it
has developed in the ways it has, and where it is presently heading.”[55] The series The Modern World-System Vol. I-III is similar in respects to Das Kapital in that it does not attempt
to explain its theoretical model; rather it crudely asserts it. Though he does not ignore empires,
city-states, or nations, for Wallerstein the ‘world-system’ “encompasses within
its bounds empires, city-states, and the emerging ‘nation-states’.”[56] Another example comes from Wallerstein’s
depiction of a “crisis within the Core” as the central component to
understanding the rise in production and prices in Europe between 1730 and 1820. By simply asserting his core-peripheral-semi
peripheral model, Wallerstein effectively argues how “the rapid response of
market prices” in external zones to the Core (Western Europe) resulted in a
general “crises d’Ancien Regime”
whereby the core regions “reacted by attempting to concentrate all the major
sources of capitalist profit within their frontiers.”[57] Wallerstein expands on Marx’s 19th-century
version of the longue durée by
integrating a model to explain the dependency of geographic regions within the
totality of the system that we call capitalism.
Ron Aronson’s text After Marxism is a necessary
contribution to the historiography because of its criticism of specific uses of historical materialism, namely
by postmodernists and so-called “analytical Marxists.” He sets himself the task of answering just
what happened to Marxism in the post-Soviet era. Aronson describes himself as among the first
to admit a post-Marxist stage of theory,[58]
but this phrasing coincides with his unique portrayal of historical materialism
in theory versus in practice. For Aronson,
his experiences growing up in the trend of New-Leftism and postmodernism
created an understanding of a unique idealistic Marxism that lacked a practical
foundation. In essence, Aronson
described the Marxist movement of the post-1970s era as “idealist.”[59] The analytical Marxists, whom Aronson states
includes “Allen Wood, Richard Miller, John Roemer, Jon Elster, Andrew Levine,
Adam Przeworski, and Eric Olin Wright,” utilize historical materialism for
analysis and discourse to generate what they call “no-bullshit Marxism.”[60] Their discourse and analysis, however,
separated itself from the activism and popular movements at the time
(particularly culture shifts following 1968 and economic shifts following
1972). Aronson’s essential point
highlighted the disconnect that occurred in mainstream academia that took
historical materialism in as a method and model without relating it to
practice. The result, Aronson suggests,
is a “Marxism without Marxism,” one that is “influenced by analytical
philosophy and mainstream ‘bourgeois’ social science.”[61] Like both Marx and Dunayevskaya in their
criticisms, Aronson’s main contribution to the historiography is the assertion
of theory in action and theory as a process as opposed to simply a model.
One of the most recent
contributions to historical materialism, and the last we will examine, comes
from Michael A. Lebowitz, in his text Following
Marx: Method, Critique and Crisis. As a method for world history, Lebowitz
depicts historical materialism as an “ideological extension of 19th-century
Hegelianism.”[62] An essential follow up to post-Marxist views
like Aronson, Lebowitz describes analytical Marxism as “anti-Marxism” and
argues for the same “return to Hegel” called for by Dunayevskaya. Only by understanding Marx’s early
flirtations with Hegel can someone understand how “Marx’s search for truth in political
economy led him to dialectics.”[63] The important aspect of Lebowitz’s analysis,
which was identified by others as well, is its “careful examination of Marxism
as a methodological project”[64]
in response to the rise of what Aronson described as “Marxism without
Marxism.” It is, in essence, an attempt
to rectify and justify historical materialism as a practical theory regardless
of a disconnect between theory and practice.
In many ways it creates the starting point from which to view historical
materialism in the present day; as a method and a theory that has yet to
reconnect with its material implications.
Conclusion: Historical Materialism as World History
This historiography has examined
a multitude of texts by connecting their implications to theory as they
developed chronologically (for the most part) over the 19th, 20th,
and into the 21st centuries.
The unifying theme of all these texts has not been their arguments, nor
has it been the structure and organization of their discourse. Rather, the unifying element is the method for depicting world history. World history is best depicted over a longue durée, with the agency of class
and the causality of theory in practice.
The ability to interpret world history in this manner, as we have seen,
can change over time as society changes, which makes it the most scientific
approach to world historical studies.
Starting with Hegel and moving
into Marx, we obtain a depiction of world history on a scale and scope that
begins to defy the very premise of a history
of nations or a history of great
leaders. We instead get a history of social relations, with the
ultimate component being that relations carry their history with them in a
constant struggle. The agency of class
holds a central feature to this method, as it is the most relative social
relation by which all others find their root.
Then moving into Lenin, we saw the development of practical materialism
as the most effective form of social science within a world divided by
class. Marcuse and Dunayevskaya’s
contributions reiterate the complexity of historical materialism in practice,
and question the negation of Hegelian influences as they were becoming
increasingly rejected by Soviet philosophers.
Braudel’s and Wallerstein’s works represent in many ways the culmination
of Marx’s view on history into a historical model from which to depict world
history. Finally, Aronson and Lebowitz
illustrate the limitations of historical materialism when it loses its touch
with social movements.
This concept of world history as
both a theory and a practice runs into some limitations, particularly in terms
of the means of conveying it as such.
Arguably, one can only fully understand the actualization of theory by
doing the grunt work of meticulous study.
Even Wallerstein’s model, which is arguably one of the best for visually
depicting a historical system, takes Wallerstein over four texts to adequately
explain. As such, there remains the
necessary work of finding a simple and concise means to convey the history that
thus answers the problem of separating theory
from practice. Hopefully continued emphasis and scholarship
on the development of the materialist conception of history can help to explain
these minor shortcomings.
Make
no mistake: it would be false to assert the absolute primacy of historical
materialism as ‘true’ reality.
Rather, this essay has sought to show how the materialist conception of
history is the most effective means
for understanding world history, regardless of Marxism’s political identity. By incorporating a perspective of the longue durée, in conjunction with a
focus on social relations and the material conditions that define them,
historical materialism gives the historian the tools for unveiling the
progression of society from one set of relations (and all of its material/ideal
components) to the next. As Marcuse and
Dunayevskaya made clear, historical materialism is not a rigid framework;
instead it bends and develops in the same manner that society does. As such, it remains the most powerful
approach for the modern social historian.
Bibliography
Angus, Ian.
“Review of Marcuse” in Herbert
Marcuse’s Heideggerian Marxism (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2005)
Aronson, Ron.
After Marxism. (NY: Guilford Press, 1995)
Braudel, Fernand.
Capitalism and Material Life: 1400-1800.
(London: Cox & Wyman Ltd, 1967)
-----. On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
-----. On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
Dunayevskaya, Raya.
“The Union Of Soviet Socialists Republics is a Capitalist Society” in Internal Discussion Bulletin of the Workers’
Party (March, 1941)
-----. Philosophy and Revolution. (NY: Lexington Books, 2003)
-----. Philosophy and Revolution. (NY: Lexington Books, 2003)
Engels,
Frederick. Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ (accessed 4/17/14, 9:15am)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ (accessed 4/17/14, 9:15am)
Hamlin,
J. Karl
Marx Sociological Theory
http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/4111/MarxReadings/KarlMarx.html (accessed 4/22/14, 6:07pm)
http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/4111/MarxReadings/KarlMarx.html (accessed 4/22/14, 6:07pm)
Harvey,
Van A. “Ludwig Feuerbach” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/Ludwig-feuerbach/ (accessed 4/18/14, 12:45pm)
Hegel, G.W. Preface
to The Phenomenology of Spirit. (NY: Oxford University Press, 1976)
Herodotus. The Histories. (NY: Barnes and Noble Publishing, 2001)
Lebowitz, Michael A.
Following Marx: Method, Critique and Crisis (Boston: Brill Publishing, 2009)
Lenin, V.I. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. (Moscow: Zveno Publishers, 1909)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/two3.htm#v14pp72h-117 (accessed 4/14/14, 2:32pm)
-----. “Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” in Collected Works, vol. 19 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977)
-----. “The Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation’” in Last Testament Letters to Congress (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1956)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/ (accessed 4/20/14, 10:42am)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/two3.htm#v14pp72h-117 (accessed 4/14/14, 2:32pm)
-----. “Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” in Collected Works, vol. 19 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977)
-----. “The Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation’” in Last Testament Letters to Congress (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1956)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/ (accessed 4/20/14, 10:42am)
Marcuse, Herbert.
Heideggerian Marxism. (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2005)
Marx, Karl. A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,
in Tucker, Robert. The Marx-Engels Reader.
-----. The German Ideology. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1932)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ (accessed 4/9/14, 9:45pm)
-----. Das Kapital, Vol. I. (NY: Vintage Books, 1977)
-----. The German Ideology. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1932)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ (accessed 4/9/14, 9:45pm)
-----. Das Kapital, Vol. I. (NY: Vintage Books, 1977)
Mathoor, Vineeth.
“A Review of Michael Lebowitz’s Following
Marx” in Capital & Class
(Oct. 2011)
Plato. Republic. (NY: Barnes and Noble Publishing, 2004)
Raapana, Niki and Nordica Fredrich. What is
the Hegelian Dialectic? (AK: ACL Books, 2002)
Robinson, Howard (Nov 3,
2011). "Dualism" In Edward N. Zalta, ed. The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition)
Schmidt,
Alfred. “Existential Ontology and
Historical Materialism in the Works of Herbert Marcuse” in Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968)
Tucker, Robert.
The Marx-Engels Reader. (NY: WW Norton & Co, 1978)
Wallerstein, Immanuel. Historical
Capitalism. (NY: Verso, 1983)
-----. The Modern World System, Vol. I. (NY: Academic Press, 1974)
-----. The Modern World System, Vol. III. (NY: Academic Press, 1989)
-----. An Introduction to World Systems Analysis, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004)
-----. The Modern World System, Vol. I. (NY: Academic Press, 1974)
-----. The Modern World System, Vol. III. (NY: Academic Press, 1989)
-----. An Introduction to World Systems Analysis, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004)
[1]
Lenin, V.I. “Three Sources and Three
Component Parts of Marxism,” in Collected
Works, vol. 19 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 23
[2]
This refers to the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union; which,
following negation theory, refers to the inability
to revert to previous systems (monarchy, socialism), and rather a progressive
continuity.
[3]
Title to one of Marx’s famous letters prior to writing The Communist Manifesto, 1843
[4] By
this, I mean that certain editions of Plato’s text (including the generic
Barnes and Noble edition published in 2004) list in their index “communism” and
cite it to the section pertaining to the “guardians of the state.”
[5]
Plato, The Republic. (NY: Barnes and Noble Publishing, 2004), 114
[6]
Plato’s Cave is probably the most famous depiction to come out of The Republic
[7]
Plato, 206-207
[8]
Herodotus, The Histories, (NY: Barnes
and Noble Publishing, 2001), Book 7, Chapter 49
[10]
Wallerstein, Immanuel. An Introduction to World Systems Analysis,
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 2
[11]
Wallerstein, Immanuel. An Introduction to World Systems Analysis,
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 2
[12] I
refer to historical materialism as a modern
form of study because it would be fruitless to pretend that theory can’t or
doesn’t change over time. Marx’s
historical materialism was the product of the 19th century; here I
am suggesting that there exists a ‘modern’ form.
[15]
Ibid, emphasis is Hegel’s
[16]
Ibid, #47
[17]
Raapana, Niki and Nordica Fredrich. What is the Hegelian Dialectic? (AK: ACL
Books, 2002)
[18]
Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in
Tucker, Robert. The Tucker Marx-Engels Reader, 53
[19]
Ibid, 60
[20] Marx,
Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in
Tucker, Robert. The Tucker Marx-Engels Reader, 61
[21]
Harvey, Van A., “Ludwig Feuerbach” in The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/Ludwig-feuerbach/, accessed
4/18/14, 12:45pm
[23]
Ibid
[24] Engels,
Frederick. Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ (accessed 4/16/14, 7:13am)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ (accessed 4/16/14, 7:13am)
[25]
Marx, Karl. The German Ideology.
(Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1932), Section B, Part 1: Civil Society
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm#b1 (accessed 4/9/14, 9:45pm)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm#b1 (accessed 4/9/14, 9:45pm)
[26]
Althusser, “Causality, Linear, Expressive and Structural” in Althusser Glossery, Marxists.org
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/althusser/ (accessed 4/23/14, 9:14am)
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/althusser/ (accessed 4/23/14, 9:14am)
[27] Marx,
Karl. The German Ideology.
(Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1932), Section B, Part 1: Civil Society
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ (accessed 4/9/14, 9:45pm)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ (accessed 4/9/14, 9:45pm)
[28]
Hamlin, J. Karl Marx Sociological Theory
http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/4111/MarxReadings/KarlMarx.html (accessed 4/22/14, 6:07pm)
http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/4111/MarxReadings/KarlMarx.html (accessed 4/22/14, 6:07pm)
[29]
See: Marx, Letters Between Marx and Engels, 1860-1864 in Collected Works. Marx wrote
as a news correspondent for a Vienna paper during the Civil War, in which he
criticized the idealistic portrayals of the event by British newspapers. As well, during the Civil War, Marx was
exposed to an actual example of class warfare…but a kind that confirmed Marx’s
argument about social relations. To the
general masses, the Civil War was a political battle between two Parties over
territory. To Marx, the Civil War was a
class struggle in which the more progressive capitalist production system was
attempting to uproot and destroy the slave-labor component that remained
antithetical to wage-labor.
[30]
Marx, Das Kapital, p. 320
[31]
Ibid, 342
[32]
I, however, would merely call this a continuation of the theory in practical
form; hence the need to divide the theory up into its Marx and post-Marx phases
in the historiographical narrative.
[33]
Image from New Left Review
http://newleftreview.org/II/43/goran-therborn-after-dialectics (accessed 4/22/14, 5:26pm)
http://newleftreview.org/II/43/goran-therborn-after-dialectics (accessed 4/22/14, 5:26pm)
[34]
Engels, Frederick. Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ (accessed 4/17/14, 9:15am)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ (accessed 4/17/14, 9:15am)
[35] Lenin,
V.I. Materialism
and Empirio-Criticism. (Moscow:
Zveno Publishers, 1909), Chapter 2, Section 3
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/two3.htm#v14pp72h-117 (accessed 4/14/14, 2:32pm)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/two3.htm#v14pp72h-117 (accessed 4/14/14, 2:32pm)
[36] Lenin,
V.I. Materialism
and Empirio-Criticism. (Moscow:
Zveno Publishers, 1909), Chapter 2, Section 4
[37]
Lenin, V.I. “The Question of
Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation’” in Last
Testament Letters to Congress (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1956)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm (accessed 4/19/14, 12:21pm)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm (accessed 4/19/14, 12:21pm)
[38]
Dunayevskaya, Raya. “The Union Of Soviet
Socialists Republics is a Capitalist Society” in Internal Discussion Bulletin of the Workers’ Party (March, 1941)
[39] Dunayevskaya,
Raya. “The Union Of Soviet Socialists
Republics is a Capitalist Society, Section II: State Capitalism” in Internal Discussion Bulletin of the Workers’
Party (March, 1941)
[40]
Ibid
[41]
Dunayevskaya. Philosophy and Religion (NY: Lexington Books, 1989), p. 52
[42]
Ibid, p. 144
[43]
Schmidt, Alfred. “Existential Ontology
and Historical Materialism in the Works of Herbert Marcuse” in Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968)
[45]
Ibid, 170
[46]
Schmidt, Alfred. “Existential Ontology
and Historical Materialism in the Works of Herbert Marcuse” in Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968)
[47]
Angus, Ian. “Review of Marcuse” in Herbert Marcuse’s Heideggerian Marxism
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2005), 224
www.academia.edu/720779/A_Review-Essay_on_Herbert_Marcuses_Heideggerian_Marxism (accessed 4/13/14, 1:50pm)
www.academia.edu/720779/A_Review-Essay_on_Herbert_Marcuses_Heideggerian_Marxism (accessed 4/13/14, 1:50pm)
[48]
Marcuse, 140
[49]
Braudel, Fernand. Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800. (London:
Cox & Wyman Ltd, 1967), xii
[50]
Ibid
[51]
Braudel, On History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. viii
[52]
Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences” in On History, p. 50-51
[53]
In his preface to Historical Capitalism,
I. Wallerstein described Marx as a man whose thoughts and works were limited to
the material realities of the 19th century, uninfluenced by
experiences we know of in hindsight.
[54]
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System Vol. I (NY:
Academic Press, 1974), p. 15
[55]
Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism. (NY: Verso, 1983), 13
[56]
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System Vol. I (NY:
Academic Press, 1974), 15
[57]
Wallerstein, The Modern World System,
Vol. III, (NY: Academic Press, 1989), 58
[58]
Aronson, Ron. After Marxism (NY: Guilford Press, 1995), p. 4
[59]
Ibid, 66
[60]
Ibid, 141
[61]
Ibid
[62]
Lebowitz, Michael A. Following Marx: Method, Critique and Crisis (Boston: Brill Publishing, 2009), 9
[63] Ibid,
113
[64]
Mathoor, Vineeth. “A Review of Michael
Lebowitz’s Following Marx” in Capital & Class (Oct. 2011): 509
No comments:
Post a Comment