In his history of modern France, Gordon Wright remarks that historians of the 1848 revolution have ”been strongly influenced by Karl Marx’s two short books” about the revolution. Thus, he feels obliged to give a “stripped-down summary” of Marx’s explanation. Marx saw the revolution as the new bourgeoisie overturning the old bourgeoisie, appearing to ally with the proletariat but actually pushing for the June rebellion—”to provide an excuse for drowning the ‘reds’ in their own blood.” Having said that, Wright begins the real story—a more accurate and nuanced picture, recounting “the same events, but viewed from a somewhat different perspective.” [1]
From what I’ve seen so far in my history classes, that’s the prevailing view of Marx. You must acknowledge him, but not be ruled by his ideas.
In the class I took on historiography, we started with Marx, attempting to capture his concept of history unfolding, especially in The German Ideology. But in most other categories of history we looked at—social history, cultural history, microhistory, environmental history—Marx did not show up very much. The exceptions are a category called “history from below” and feminist history. (Later, I discovered two histories of craft guilds that had a Marxist tone.)
“History from below” included writing by Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, who wrote about labor, especially in the nineteenth century. Thompson’s goal stated goal was “to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the utopian artisan… from the enormous condescension of posterity.” [2] That sounds like romantic Marxism. Who can complain about that?
Well, someone did complain: the feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott. While she admired Thompson’s work, she found much to be corrected: “Women are referred to without comment as cheap labor used to substitute for men in the fields, workshops, and mills. The focus here is on capitalism’s impact on male workers, not on the reasons for women’s lower status and lower value in the labor market.“ [2] Women’s history, she says, should include not only more detail about women but also “examining the ways the feminine is used to construct conceptions of class.” [3]
The materialist Marx may be on his death bed, but not the cultural Marx, says Paul G. Kengor in an essay on the 200th year anniversary of Marx’s birth. Cultural Marxism is “a form of Marxism so radical in its redefinition of human nature that Marx himself would blush and find it bewildering,” he says.
Kengor then discusses the Frankfurt School in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, which rescued the class struggle that Marx so much believed in, providing “the accelerator pedal that was missing from the wheezing, stalling vehicle.” Economic class struggles weren’t working (especially in America), but there still were, or could be, oppressed groups.
So cultural Marxism, says Kengor, adopted victimized groups, one after the other—women, minorities, gays, trans-gendered people, etc. Each group can stand in for Marx’s exploited “proletarian” class. And about the same time, Italian Antonio Gramsci figured out how cultural Marxism was to be adopted—by a “march through the institutions,” starting with universities. You can read more about this march in a three-part series by Jay Schalin on the Martin Center site.
[1] Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times, 4th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 129-131.
[2] E. P. Thompson, Preface to The Making of the English Working Class, (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 12.
[3] Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 74.
[4] Scott, 89.
Wallace: It’s sad. People today know little about socialism and communism. That’s why I’m studying history–to try to place the current day in the framework of the past. I won’t be studying the Russian revolution; it’s very grim. But then some of the Tudor and Stuart experience (which I’m studying now) is equally gruesome, maybe in some ways worse.
Victor Sebastyen, in his recent biography, “Lenin”, begins by contemplating if Lenin has any relevance today. I quote, “Millions of people, and some dangerous populist leader on the Left and Right, are doubting whether liberal democracy has been successful in creating a fair society and sustained freedom and prosperity, or can deal with gaping inequality and injustice. The phrases ‘global elite’, and ‘the 1 percent’ are now used in a decidedly Leninist way. It is unlikely that Lenin’s solutions will be adopted anywhere again. But his questions are constantly being asked today, and may be answered by equally bloody methods.”