So, What Is Left of Marx and Socialism?
Historians of my generation grew up in the Cold War decades in a world divided between (what Marxists call) bourgeois democracy, on one side, and statist socialism, on the other, and the dichotomy between a utopia of exclusively political rights versus a utopia of social and economic rights. We learned from the Soviet and East European experiments the bitter lesson that there is no real socialism without political democracy, and some of us concluded from our own political experience in countries polarized between the very wealthy and the rest that there is no real democracy without some kind of socialism. Perhaps not for most of those in the Soviet historical profession, but for a minority of practitioners Marx remained an inspiration, a provider of questions rather than a priori answers.
Marx himself was many things in his life—a post-Hegelian radical searching for the source of the expected German revolution; an Enlightenment rationalist who believed in naturalistic explanations of social and natural phenomena, rather than in supernatural or religious causes; a social scientist with a deep faith in empirical research; a moral philosopher, a secular humanist, who thought he could provide a factual, real-world basis for such normative categories as exploitation, inequality, and emancipation; a historical sociologist avant la lettre who believed he had discovered the laws of social motion in the class struggle as well as the instrument of human liberation from capital, the proletariat. Here one might argue that science was superseded by eschatology, and that in its futurism, Marxism became a religion done up in scientific drag.3 For scholars today, Marx is most importantly a poser of questions, the formulator of a vast research program that he himself had too little time to realize. His questions, his critiques, his values, and his moral vision remain part of a legacy that encompasses a powerful specter still haunting global capitalism and bourgeois democracy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Those questions, critiques, and values continue to inspire people in many parts of the world who without them would be even more disempowered before the onslaught of global capitalism and American hegemony.
Whether or not they were Marxist in orientation themselves, the generation of historians that was educated in the 1960s and entered the Soviet studies profession in the 1970s had a particularly intense engagement with Marx and Marxist historiography. Theirs was a moment of exploration of the new social history that came out of Britain and France, some of it overtly socialist history, the replacement of the older emphasis on structure with a gravitation toward appreciation of human agency, experience, culture, and later of discourse and the problem of meaning. All those influences—whether Eric Hobsbawm’s revealing study of primitive rebels, E. P. Thompson’s concern with experience, the feminists’ radical deconstruction of naturalized identities, the scholars of nationalism’s constructivist assault on primordialized communities—had the cumulative effect of historicizing what had been taken for granted, undermining what common sense told us had always been the way it was now. They gave one a sense that intellectual work was more than academic, and could have real effects on the real world; that scholarship, even in its need to be apolitical or extra-political, as neutral, objective, and evidence-based as possible, had a politics that could not be denied. Our generation rejected a Marxism that reduced ideas and politics to economics, dismissed the base/superstructure model of determination, and echoed Engels who in his last letters repeatedly denied that he and Marx were economic determinists.
This generation puzzled over the “relative autonomy” of politics and the state, was infatuated at first with the young Marx and the problem of alienation and the fulfillment of human potential. From the notion of an early and late Marx, many tried to integrate the humanist utopianism of the 1844 manuscripts with the materialist structural analysis of Capital; we trudged through the Grundrisse with Hobsbawm’s assistance, looked to Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács for aid (and comfort), and tried to find substitute proletariats—African-Americans, women, Chinese or Vietnamese peasants—when the White working class of America put on their hard hats and joined Richard Nixon and his racist “Southern Strategy.” Perhaps the moment of realization for me that the American Left was in trouble was when at the University of California, Berkeley, I heard the writer Imamu Amear Baraka, the former LeRoi Jones, reduced to quoting from the selected works of Enver Hoxha and the Albanian Communist newspaper Zëri i Popullit. It was an exhilarating journey that ended up with becoming a tenured radical (first at Oberlin and later at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago) just as the “revolution” turned into Reaganism. Disappointment, yes; discouragement and disillusionment, no—at least not for many of us. Marx, if he gives you anything, provides an appreciation of contradictions and a sense of historical progression (not necessarily progress, as it turned out) that guards against mistaking the present for the future, within a radical historicist sense that all that seems natural is historically constructed, constantly changing and being replaced. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”
Marx’s view of history, unlike liberal modernization theory, did not end with capitalism or legitimize the present as the best of all possible worlds. Even in his appreciation of the power and productivity of capitalism, he aimed to subvert and supersede bourgeois society in the interest of a more egalitarian, socially just, and democratic form of society. This vision certainly contains within it a utopia, as does any politics except conservative acceptance of the way the world exists at any one time. That utopia, that different and better future which the overwhelming one-dimensionality of the liberal political imagination renders ridiculous, retains enormous power, even for those who would not think to align themselves with Marx, as an immanent critique of the limits, mystifications, apologetics, and deceptions of bourgeois democracy and market capitalism. Utopia, in other words, might be thought of not in the usual sense of an impossible dream, but rather as a far-off goal toward which one directs one’s political desires, even if the ultimate objective might never be reached. My personal goal, for instance, might be perfect health, immortality. Even though I know neither is possible, that does not stop me from going to the gym for a workout.
For those who embrace its positive meaning, socialism is a utopia—not in the sense of an unattainable goal but rather in the sense of a direction toward which people might point their political desires. The political goal, whether reachable or not, is the empowerment of all the people, social justice, and equality (not only of opportunity, as liberals believe, but of reward, as much as is practically possible). Socialism stands opposed to the proposition so central to classical liberal (now conservative) economic ideology, that individual greed will magically produce the greatest good for the greatest number and that capitalism is the end of history. Moreover, by resurrecting a politics aimed at the common good, socialism—in contrast to liberalism but closer to some forms of conservatism, religion, and nationalism—seeks the restoration of a social solidarity fractured by the individualizing effects of competitive market relations. That utopia remains a telos for socialist politics.
Historians and other scholars also operate in a utopian context. As a discipline, history provides what knowledge we can have about how the present was made and what human beings might or might not do in the future. It contributes both to how we understand what nations and societies are, and to the intellectual constitution of our imagination of political communities, which could not exist without the narratives that make up national and social histories. Even as historians seek to render an objective understanding of the past and propose a critique of what they consider to be “mythological” formulations, they are forced to accept that they too are products of historical pasts and historically constituted presents. The educator was educated somewhere and at some time. Accuracy and balance may be the closest we can come to objectivity and neutrality. None of us is without political commitments; some of us are more engaged than others; but those commitments and engagements can contribute to the seriousness with which we do history.
In the essays that follow the reader may feel the tension between the utopian goals of objective, neutral history and the influences of the temporal, spatial, and political contexts that shape the historian. In no historiography is this more palpable than in the history of Russia, the Soviet Union, and Communism. As produced both in the USSR and the West, that body of work has proven almost impossible to free from the tension between the historian’s noble ideal of objectivity and the partisan political arena in which that history has been