Nothing Comes from Nothing: A View of History from the Left
Introduction
All too often, we hear about events that are “unprecedented,” where we could not have predicted their outcomes; they seem to come from nowhere. I have heard so many times that we are living in a time that has no precedent, that history cannot, seemingly, explain. But what on earth does that mean? Why do we believe that the chaos of the past years is something new, something that has never happened before? To get to the heart of these questions, we need to take a long look at how we view history, how history drives us today, and what portions of history can explain it. This will be quite a voyage, and one which will not be comfortable; it will force us to consider the dark pasts of white supremacy and the groundwork of our economic system. In due course, I will discuss, first, how we view history in the modern day, particularly in popular discussion. It would be pretty meaningless to criticize only the academic views of history; nobody really reads them until they get to college, and just as often, they quickly forget it.
Then, in a series of long-winded descriptions (sorry, that’s just how it’ll probably be), I’ll cover the Marxist view of history, and how it provides the most useful interpretation compared to more recent trends in historic thought, and trace these trends to their intellectual origins. The final conclusion will explain how history regards itself, how people regard history, and the relationship between history and the people, as it is today.
History in Today’s World
There is a widespread belief in the United States that we live in a country which itself is unique, and perhaps that is true. It is not true because we are a beacon of democracy and opportunity. It is not true because we are a country which glorifies the wealthy and demonizes the poor. It is because we, as a country, wish to remain oblivious to the history which informs us now. Come now, don’t be upset. All histories lie. All of the histories that are taught in school, because of how they are structured, are, by their very definition, lies.
What should we discuss first? I think probably the purpose of history in today’s society. What is the purpose of history? Let us begin here, and then we will discuss what it really means. What people think the purpose of history is is definitely different from what history actually is. The purpose of history, according to most, is a very abstract study we may sum up as “understanding why things happen in the past, and what happened in the past.” That is not really what history is, but that is what dusty old academics want it to be. They would be contented to sit in a library all day and read through old newspapers and write papers and leave it at that. If we want to really understand where historic study comes from, we will have to look at ourselves. How do we use history?
We use history to justify our political opinions. Where does the history come in? It is something turned towards a political purpose, a tool of warfare and conflict on the battleground for political reality and material substance. What does this mean? History is not objective, nor can it be. It can be understood, yes, but can we know it? No. No person has ever been objective, no history exists in a vacuum, where there is no context to the person who wrote it, where there is absolute, objective truth. It has become fashionable to discuss historic events as “facts.” Every history follows an internal logic, and one that justifies its own existence. And by and large, we must trace this to the development of a certain way of producing things.
Let us analyze the modern school of historians: “liberals.” They form the group which we may call the orthodox contemporary historians, the people who lead the historic school of the present. They are, by and large, college educated, white, and middle to upper-middle-class. And now they use the word “unprecedented” very often; we live in a world without precedent, which has never been experienced before. That is a very wishy-washy term. That is a very imprecise term. This shows us, not that the world is changing, but that the forces that driving it are reinforcing themselves; it represents a continuity, one which we may trace unbroken to the very founding of the American republic.
They say that these times are “unprecedented,” but perhaps the reason they keep insisting on this is because they never bothered to learn about the precedents. This killing is “unprecedented!” That action is “unprecedented!” This violence is “unprecedented!” Liberals like to say these wishy washy things about precedent as though they have studied these world historic trends that explain all of history. They think that these events are unprecedented because it offends their small minds to understand the brutality of their own history. They do not confront the past as it is, they confront the past as they want to understand it, in its sanitized form, without conflict, in that endless march towards progress. How naïve! We come across the would-be historian who understands nothing of the past!
The liberal historians do not understand that no historian is objective. Each historian, no matter what, is branded with a certain ideology, and that ideology cannot be properly explained by anything except their material position in society. Their every interaction, the pattern of behavior and work that they occupy, is where they get their understanding of history. It is because of this that we cannot trust them; the vast majority of these would be “historians” are white, petty bourgeois liberals who have had few, if any interactions with the working class. Mao stated that “in a class society…every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.” [1]
Now we look at the makeup of these liberal historians, with their bourgeois respectability, their bourgeois morality, their bourgeois understandings, and how can we expect them to understand their role in history? We cannot expect anything concrete, anything substantial from this school of history, only platitudes and inconsistencies. We find, in the liberal mindset, that there are problems which are specifically attached to individuals, to thoughts, to ideas, that pervade the whole society, and if one can only overcome these ideas, the world will be a better place. That is a misunderstanding of how the world works. It is a misunderstanding of how society has developed, how the state arises, how the world organizes itself.
We come across the state of history today as an outgrowth of psychoanalysis, of Lacan, of Foucault, and of Derrida. We come across the so-called “linguistic turn” over and over again, and the postmodern trends that define society as we currently understand it, and as we now understand the world. Let us observe now that as Marx criticized the German ideology, we criticize the American history along the same lines. “It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy to German reality.” [2] And so these would-be American historians do not inquire into the connection between their ideas of history and the reality of their present situation. They probe at the surface, but ultimately do nothing else.
Historical Materialism
Now they talk about precedent without understanding history, a cruel joke to anybody who understands how it has progressed. Let’s start to define the material understanding of history, then, hopefully in words that these reactionaries can understand. In the words of Marx, in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class conflict.” Mao, when he discussed history, observed that “the people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.” [3] These are easily visible if we look to historic trends. The United States has been driven by three very specific forces in history: imperialism, patriarchy, and capitalism. Two of these make way for the other. Patriarchy and imperialism make capitalism possible. But if we look at history in the way that these would be liberal “historians” do, then we will ignore important parts of historical study.
There are, of course, several concepts we have to get out of the way first. The first is what exactly a social class is. Of course, as a Marxist this is a pretty obvious question, but if you have not read up on this type of theory before, the question becomes much more meaningful. A person’s social class refers, in the first place, to how that person arrives at material sustenance (or how they survive in the context of the society). If I earn all my money (which I exchange for food) through employing others to use my property to produce things, I am not of the same social class as the person who uses my property to produce things sold for profit. I am the employer; I own the means through which one produces products. They are the producer, the person who produces value in the form of products sold on the market.
Taking this forwards, how do we understand the world in general? How do we interact with others? What is the materialist view of history? People often like to strip history of its context, but we as Marxists understand that nothing happens in a vacuum. Nothing is devoid of context. If we try to organize historic events without putting them in context, we will come up with the wrong causes for the wrong events. Voila! We have stripped history of history! The search for cause and effect is at the heart of history, and when we cannot explain cause to effect, we have failed our task. But now let us address the questions.
Creating a Worldview
How do we understand the world? The Marxist answer is very straightforward. We understand the world by our actions and relationships in the world. We do not know anything outside of our own practice, that is to say, our own “sensuous human activity,” or “practical activity.” [4] What do you do on a daily basis? This is where your knowledge comes from. I go interact with people on a daily basis, whether through speaking to them in person, engaging with them in taking community action, etc. In the Marxist view, our actions alone give us knowledge, and our conversations and the group actions we take on with others — our social interactions, so to speak — are the sole things that give us knowledge. If we do not have experience, do not talk to people, do not interact with the material struggles of others, then we do not know anything at all. In other words, the materialist viewpoint is that somebody’s knowledge comes from social practice. Let’s define social practice: a person’s actions in the context of their society, including “production,” “class struggle, political life, scientific and artistic pursuits,” and so on. [5] This social practice is how we understand the world.
Examining Our Social Practice
On to the next question, although we’ve already partly answered it. How do we interact with the world? We interact with it politically, culturally, and economically. To define politics, let’s say it’s the way we make decisions in groups of people. Culture, that’s a bit more difficult. How to put this…Culture is how the world views itself; it is created by a certain group of people, and it suits the interests of a certain group of people. In current American society, the people who control, who create culture, are the white, male, colonizer class, who hold the overwhelming majority of wealth and employ others to make culture using their property. Because of this, how we interact with culture is determined partly by a certain employee-employer relationship. Culture takes the form of a product, bought and sold on the market, and it is produced in a certain way that reflects the interest of a certain social class. If we want to talk a lot more on culture and how it does so, we could read Althusser, but he’s pretty dry and boring. [6] I will summarize. Culture is something which is built, and which represents the interests of a certain material class, and it is designed to suit those interests. The interests of the ruling class are the interests reflected in the creation of culture; the majority (by an overwhelming margin) of media outlets are owned by wealthy property-owners, and reflect the interests of the owner-classes. Because it is in the class interest of the owner-classes to maintain their economic domination, the culture that emerges from their media is designed to support this economic standing.
Does culture affect how we interact with others? Yes. We seem to like to look at the world as though we ourselves came up with the latest cultural trend. This is not the case; we as individuals have pretty much nothing to do with how culture develops. Can we as individuals make all the other individuals around us like a certain thing? No! So culture cannot be an individual event. The very way we talk and speak, this is part of culture; the basic way we act around other people, what is acceptable and unacceptable, that is culture. So when we say that the culture upholds a certain domination of the producer-classes by the owner-classes, we say that the way we are taught to act, to speak, to think, are all influenced by the owner-classes. Now culture is another arena, so to speak, of class conflicts between the producers and the owners. The mainstream culture is directed by the owner-class, and produced by a class of producers. There are different producing classes; in this case, they don’t make a physical product, but an imaginary one.
Another good question we must ask is “Who controls our politics?” This question is one of the most important in Marxism. Because of their great wealth, politics are dominated by the owner-classes. The government, as it currently is, is an outgrowth of conflict between several groups; it was created as, and still is, the tool of the owner-classes to make their dominance possible. When the producing-classes rise up, it is always the government (we will call it “the state”) that will put down the uprising. Lenin understood this well. [7] The state is the result of warfare between the owner- and producer-classes. Because of this, the state keeps up the interests of one particular class, in the case of modern America, the owner-classes. The state is another head of the hydra of capitalist imperialism, another different point where the economic system remakes itself.
The Focus on Economics
People always want to accuse materialists of focusing on economics too much. I mean, what else should we focus on? The ideas that float around in people’s heads are impossible to study, and their culture is just as wishy-washy a topic. Both of these are very flexible, very complex things, and both, as I said previously, depend on dominant economic system where they exist. So what is culture? It is another point that the economic system manipulates. Psychology? It is another thing which is subject largely to the world, the “material existence” so to speak, in which we live. Trauma is brought about, not by single individuals, but the actions of individuals, no? Psychology is brought about by experiences. And where do these experiences take place? In the material world. What helps to determine activities and action in the material world? Economics, and the way we organize production. The way that people survive in the economic system where they currently live is the main factor in influencing psychology. Most stressors can be tied back to these crude system-wide factors, and are in fact, direct results of these systemic factors.
Culture, as we said before, is not an end in itself. Culture, if we look at it closely enough, is the tool of class warfare. It is the outcry of a people constantly in crisis, and it is a necessary tool to preserve that constant state of crisis. Culture is a response to certain shifting material conditions, not some abstract thing in itself. If we may call culture a collective framework of psychology, then psychology is based and grounded in our experiences; among our experiences the first necessity is for material survival. Ultimately, we define economics as the method of “producing the means of subsistence;” if we can’t eat, I find it unlikely that philosophy, that psychology would develop external to the experience of material scarcity, or the conditions which result from it. [8]
The first task, so to speak, of any economy, is to make sure it can continue with as little change as possible. What does this mean? The economy is made, so to speak, to remake itself in the same way, over and over again. It is made to soak up the energies forming against it, and recycles these into itself. This is a pretty abstract concept, I’ll say. However, it takes very real forms, material forms. The white backlash to the uprisings in Kenosha, Louisville, Denver, and Minneapolis are an example. The oppression of black and brown Americans is not only a by-product of capitalism, it is how capitalism remakes itself in its own form. The reaction is fomented, not by the lowest of the white working class (these people have little time to dedicate on race, given that they don’t have money for rent and groceries). It sits and ferments in the activities of the white upper, middle, and upper working classes.
The economy of the United States is built upon the murder of its colonized citizens. It is drenched in blood and suffering, and continues to remain blood-soaked and murderous. This is the base of Marxism; we look at what the economy needs to remake itself in the current form, and we study the current form of the economy. I’ve tried to make this as understandable as possible, but if need be I will clarify.
History Through the Marxist Lens
Historians accuse Marxists of fitting history to their own goals. We do not deny this; history is a tool of class oppression, so it suits the goals of a particular class. There is this popular conception in epistemology that we should adopt a view that comes from nowhere; this is an admirable goal, should we believe that anyone’s perception of the truth can come from nowhere. As Marxists, we acknowledge that ultimately the historian’s opinion comes, not from their intellectual or ideal position in attempting to remove themselves from the facts, but from their very inability to do so. In attempting to state that they are objective, they are appealing to the popular bourgeois belief that and individual can, in fact, separate themselves from their society, which is an impossibility. What hope is there from the truth?
Truth and Marxism
There is a popular idea that Marxism relativizes everything. Of course it does. We view the past with the purpose of informing ourpresent actions. We cannot view the past from this “view from nowhere.” Nothing comes from nothing. We cannot understand history without understanding it through our own present social environment, which means we have to view history through our current economic structure. The results are that there are contradictions in history; there are several views expressing themselves through several different class perspectives. What is the truth? This is an epistemic question that all disciplines, history and philosophy and others wrangle with constantly.
The Marxist understanding of the truth is a result of certain doctrines, notably the development of Standpoint Theory. [9] I’ll cut to the chase. A person views things differently based upon their material condition; as such, no person is independent of their material relation to the society. My perspective depends on how I obtain food, water, and shelter, and how I relate to other people’s pursuits of food, water, and shelter. If I get more information from the perspective of those engaging in struggle against the dominant narrative, against liberalism and class oppression, or what have you, my perspective gains something which previously, I did not have. My labor is far removed from the process of production; it has little basis in observable reality, and so my perspective is mired in that absence of reality. If I were to begin engaging in class struggle, integrating my abstract with the practical, then I am much less cut off from reality.
Of course, this means nothing for the process of actually constructing the reality. We know from Mao that reality is an exercise in experience, and only in experience. It is, in ways empirical, but Marxist empiricism comes with conditions; we acknowledge that the material position of the person who has knowledge affects how they understand that knowledge. Because of this, we understand that the process of production is the basic activity of human life. The closer one is to engaging in the process of production, the more so one has the opportunity to form a correct understanding of that process; it is why Maoists believe in the Mass Line theory. All understandings that we have are derived from the masses. We carry out our organizing through engaging with those most closely related to the process of production; in the words of Mao, we “take the ideas of the masses and concentrate them.” [10]
It is through the concentration of the ideas of the masses that we arrive at the potential for truth. This is the fundamental groundwork of a Marxist epistemology.
The Fundamentals of History
We know history through the actions of those most often engaged in the process of production. What does that make our sources? Peasant diaries, oral histories, cultural traditions, art, mass culture, and so on. The perspective we seek out is not that of the landlord, the bourgeoisie, or any other dominant class; we only seek these to understand their conflicts with the lower classes. Any account from an oppressor class cannot be taken at face value. At the same time, we must distill the ideas of the oppressed classes to create a coherent narrative as well. This does not mean that everything the oppressed class says is true. That would be completely absurd, and it would neglect the role of culture and politics in shaping the behavior of the oppressed classes.
We are to create a coherent class narrative by analyzing those who had a particular material position, and expressed themselves in a variety of ways, such that they shared a perspective. They share that perspective based upon their material position within their relations to the production of value. So when we discuss the perspective of one class or another, it is a consciousness without the firm edge of the individual; the individual themselves is “made up of” several material relations, for instance, property ownership, relation to the production of value, and relation to the means of production, etc. So when we discuss the narrative of an oppressed class, we attempt to take and combine the knowledge of the people that class had of their own position, and use the understandings of the oppressor classes as supplements to the narratives of that class.
We regard sources as shaped by material circumstance and shaped by the direct results of that material circumstance (culture, politics, society, what have you). This is how Marxists attempt to understand the past.
The Philosophical Roots of Liberal History
Where does liberal history come from? It comes from the development of industrial capitalism and the justifications for the dominance of the bourgeoisie. The core notion of two schools of liberal historians is that individuals, events, and ideas can be isolated and studied without interference by the historian or their society. It is born on the same liberal notion that there is a coherence, a narrative to which they may point that brings them from past to present. In this idea, there is a tension between two concepts: the idea that we are in a better position to understand history than those in the past, and the idea that the current situation is a result of the past.
More current schools, the postmodernists and the psychoanalysts, have different views, but their premises, as we will soon observe, are self-defeating and lead to dangerous conclusions. The most important figures among these two schools are Foucault and White, then Freud and Lacan respectively. They attempt to decenter the study of history, and while successful, they display in full view another liberal paradigm of this isolated individual, again and again; they are a study in hegemony.
Lord Acton and Historical Exceptionalism
The most striking figure in the liberal historic tradition is Lord Acton, the historian that believed that the current age is characterized by a “forward movement” that “divides it broadly from the older world.” [11] That movement he characterizes is the movement of society from the partial past to the impartial present, and he assumes, as many popular liberal historians assume, that the current moment is impartial, factual, objective. It is this dangerous notion that led us down the path to positivism in the first place, that led us to say: “human heredity, and all human traits are the results of natural law.” Positivism is a liberal disorder. It holds that all things may be explained through the scientific process, that all things obey certain universal laws, that cannot change, ever. This is a characteristic of both liberal and conservative histories, but Marxist histories avoid this. We understand that there are no natural laws.
Acton believes that the people in his era, like these modern liberal historians, “have the power to be more rigidly impersonal, disinterested, and just than” the people of the past. [12] This is certainly an arrogant statement, and perhaps self-contradictory. He lists this without any historic proof, without any explanation of how these liberal historians have a greater potential to be unbiased. And, if we look into it, there is no reason. The historic mind is not the same as the mind of the historian today, certainly, but that does not mean that the one of today is in any way less influenced by the society in which it lives.
This is only another form of exceptionalism; we believe because we exist in the present, that we know more than people in the past. This is not how knowledge develops. Knowledge does not develop in a straight line along some ideal model of human development; it dips itself into the present, and wades among the bones and bodies of the dead and dying. Knowledge itself bathes in blood and the violence of current society; it is the product of struggle and modern experience, which are made up by our own material surroundings. Knowledge is born in the crucible of the oppressed.
Dugald Stewart and Historic Progress
From here we can even Move on to Dugald Stewart, who helped to formulate the Smithian school of historic inquiry. It, too holds a certain perspective conditioned by the society in which it existed. He states that “long been received as an incontrovertible logical maxim that the capacities of the human mind have been in all ages the same, and that the diversity of phenomena exhibited by our species is the result merely of the different circumstances in which men are placed.” [13] This, too, shares some form of universality. However, it ignores the presence of history in the present. He, furthermore, draws on Acton, where he asserts that history is a “transition…from the first simple efforts of uncultivated nature, to a state of things so wonderfully artificial and complicated.” [14]
In this statement, he implies again the linear process in which they develop knowledge. It would definitely be nice if we were to understand our past in greater detail because we simply lived in the present, but that seems like a very naïve hope. Let us parse the prior quote more closely, where he describes that “the diversity of phenomena exhibited by our species is the result merely of the different circumstances in which men are placed.” It is interesting that, during his long writing about how there is a universal human nature, he refuses steadfastly to look at his own view of human nature as a result of his own circumstances. Indeed, it is interesting that the popular liberal historians today like to draw this universality to human behavior; yet they somehow remove themselves from the equation. Only they can be objective, only they are able to see this universal human nature, because they are unique. It is that precise liberal arrogance that makes their views of history problematic.
Good for you, you remember a bit more of the past than some other people. And then they take that piece, their own understanding of the past to be the only possible interpretation of the past from the evidence. That is pretty arrogant. I would be willing to bet that a liberal white historian and a Black Marxist historian would come to very different conclusions about history. And yet, the liberal might still insist that their perspective, their way of understanding, is more correct.
Foucault, White, and the Dangers of Postmodern Relativism
After these more aged historians, we come to two other perspectives on history, both of which fall victim to the social and economic assumptions of liberalism as well. The most current trends are towards psychoanalysis in history and the development of postmodern history. These two are incredibly difficult to pin down in a few words. To try to define these respectively, I will boil them down to what precisely defines them. Postmodern history views history as a literary exercise; there is no difference, in the postmodern opinion, between poetry and history, although this goes against Lord Acton and the positivist Stewart, as both reproduce culturally current symbols in order to express a particular meaning. All meanings, so to speak, are valid.
Foucault was groundbreaking in this respect. He stated and successfully defended that our current opinions on the past are as much an expression of our current situation as they are an objective analysis of the past. Of course, he attaches this to the abstract definition of power that he describes in his History of Sexuality, which is almost a full page long, and is about as specific as pointing out the fact of existence as a definition of what an iPhone is. [15] Nonetheless, I will delve into his historic relativism for a little while. His view is that the whole of human history is an unceasing shift between intellectual institutions, backwards, forwards, left and right, and that there is little material drive to these shifts of institutions; rather the institutions are the product of long historic processes in language, that is to say, in discourse. The means through which Foucault expresses his concept of, not only sexuality, but knowledge itself, is in the urge towards “pathologization” of sexuality. He is concerned, with the definition of the homosexual, not the actions of the homosexual. In other words, the homosexual is a person, not who engages in the homosexual act, but a person whose activity is described by the power relations implicit in the word and definition “homosexual,” and so on.
His perspective, if we wish to term it so, sees a single force within western society: the force of classification, that of science and empirical observation as a means of creating knowledge and controlling the population. He analyzes, for one, the relation between the priest and the confessor, and the relation of one to the other. He notes that this intellectual relationship is parallel to the current relationship within medicine and all others attempts to gain clinical knowledge in human behavior. Of course, this view comes from a certain perspective. This is the weakness of postmodernism; it does not critically analyze its own relation to society. Ironically it places itself in that “nowhere” that isolates itself from the event, and then places itself inside the event. The development of a postmodern history believes that there is no difference between history and philosophy; they are, if we treat them in a postmodern fashion, the same. We see this in the popular postmodern historian, Hayden White, who asserts that the most prominent way we “make sense of a set of events…is to encode [them] in terms of culturally provided categories.” [16]
Why is this insufficient? I don’t argue that we express things linguistically. That much is obvious; if we didn’t I very much doubt that I’d be writing this. However, this postmodern perspective acts as though these “culturally provided categories” can exist external to any objective reality, and because this, the material reality is determined, so to speak, by the categories, not the other way around. The postmodern historian is very good at describing things, but never explaining them. Why does an event happen? The postmodernist holds that there is no satisfactory answer to this question, and so that we can’t really attach a “causation” to reality without leaving reality altogether. It is a form of extreme idealism that is, in all reality, useless. Can we inform our current decisions by saying “I guess the language caused that event?” No. In this way, postmodernism only has a single use; it states that there is no “view from nowhere,” which Marxists had already fully acknowledged. Of course, then the postmodern perspective says: now here’s the view from everywhere where everything is equally (un)real. It is a jump to say that events have no material cause, and then it is another jump to imply that because all perspectives have a view, all of them are almost equally valid.
Here, postmodernism becomes dangerous. It cannot distinguish between one narrative as materially real, and another as materially false. And what does this mean? White supremacy becomes as equally valid as decolonization. Both of them are expressed in culturally determined forms. So now both of them represent a different form of understanding, just from a different linguistic and cultural perspective. They become equal, in analytic terms.
Psychoanalysis: Lacanian Revision and Freudian Origins
Now, let us define the psychoanalytic school. The psychoanalyst views history as an exercise in memories, repression, and (in the more modern psychoanalysis) the expression of desire and transgression. This school heavily focuses upon two different aspects of history: memory and repression. In the representation of Freud himself, we see an attempt to grasp at a cultural historic theory; it is no longer a history based in reality, but in feelings, perceptions, and anxieties. How does this contribute to the historic study? It means the reproduction of certain cultural structures within individual actions, and here we find the birth of the symbol. Individuals (note the term) within the society act because they seek to ensure their stability and security, and to do this they reenact these cultural symbologies.
Lacan is a different can of worms; while Freud relied on the reproduction of sexual symbols within the society, Lacanian psychoanalysis tends to focus, not on culturally current symbols, but the reproduction of certain relations of sexuality and violence. The Lacanian trend focuses upon the repression inherent in the definition of the individual; the individual is at the same time an agent in their own production and the product of that production. The way that they define themselves and the way that society defines them play dual roles in the production of their identity; in other words, how the individual feels about themselves is still, once again, the most important part of the school. It discusses at its heart the definition of social concepts and the repression implicit in those social concepts. I have here merely paraphrased their assertions here, as with both of these authors the translations of words are particularly problematic (especially of words like Freud’s wollen in German and certain words in Lacan that do not bear the same connotation outside of French). However, both function upon the doctrine of repression.
Foucault addresses them particularly well (I shall not quote him because much of his work is incomprehensible) in the section of his History of Sexuality entitled “The Repression Hypothesis.” Implicit in the definition of an action as a pathology, there is the idea that the action becomes abnormal, and when it becomes a pathology, it taints the entirety of the individual. The distinction between the subject and the object of prosecution disappear, in this case. It is because this pathologization does not break from the previous juridical structure of priest/confessor, scientist/subject, and subject/object of study distinctions, that the whole of our understanding cannot mean much.
The weakness of these psychological approaches is that there is a missing link somewhere; these approaches are very good ways to explain what society is like, and how people feel within the society, but they do not approach well the problem of why society is the way it is. It treats the society as a composite of individuals, but it also states that these individuals may be generalized to the entire society. Because of this, the whole school becomes unstable, wavering on the knife’s-edge of credibility. To be valid, the psychoanalysts either have to make the assumption that a small group of cases, typically no more than ten within a given time period, can explain the actions of the entire society. It assumes a generality to the human psyche which is a relic of previous assumptions, namely Stewart’s assumption that human nature is universal. This poses a unique conflict between the individual and society that the psychoanalyst historians do not address. Why should we believe that these few cases can speak for society?
Roots
Acton: False Distance and Impartiality
Where did these concepts of history come from? Let us look at Lord Acton. He is a member of the gentry, a well-educated enlightenment thinker from one of the most prominent families in the United Kingdom at the time. How can he possibly understand history from the perspective of people with whom he is not acquainted? The unfortunate consequence for him is that his history has less to do with reality than a mayfly does with the Krebs Cycle. He doesn’t need to go outside the library to understand his version of history; he doesn’t even need to talk to other people, because his perspective is one divinely inspired, unique to his time, and uniquely objective. He removes himself from the historic process, and so he removes himself from the very society which he proposes to study. He removes himself from the reality of his own existence, and then expects to write history from this utter absence of material reality.
He has a certain status that is based upon his relations to production. He produces nothing; indeed, he never wrote a complete history book, but he remains a member of the landed aristocracy, whose position is unquestionable in the study of the historic practice. His political and economic standing makes him the most prominent historian of his time, and now he proclaims that he has the most unbiased view because he is so removed from society. Somehow, the person most removed from reality is the person who has the right to proclaim what reality is. At the same time, this masks an inherent contradiction; he is intimately enmeshed within reality. He eats food that are grown in a certain process of production, in a house that somebody else produced, reading books that were printed by another person, going through accounts that another person wrote. So we see, he has social relations, and this shapes him. He believes that he is in a unique position because that mirrors his economic prominence, the worldview that was made by his interactions with other people; his removal from immediate production lends him the perspective that he is removed from the past, but he truly is not.
Stewart: A Trend Towards Universality
The ideas of Dugald Stewart represent a particular social perspective as well. He, as Lord Acton, does not participate in the process of production of commodities, and therefore is separated from the immediate material reality of that process. However, this only hides his material relations given his material position. He proclaims to view reality through the unbiased lens of a new philosophy, without realizing that the philosophy to which he refers is not an impartial one. He falls prey to the same enlightenment position that Acton has, the illusion of impartiality.
Perhaps it is more telling that this is an oblivion within that particular school of enlightenment history. Stewart makes these assertions in a particular intellectual context that is not necessarily attached to the form of reality least removed from production. Indeed, his own standard of living is contingent upon the means of production and the material relations that he erases. He wrote the most telling quote I mentioned previously, that one on human nature, in an introduction to the essays of Adam Smith, which gives immediate pause to those analyzing his assertions to impartiality. At least I have stated the premises on which my own analysis rest, while he has attempted to erase them.
Stewart is known to have proposed the concept of conjectural history, in other words, the use of induction to predict the actions that people may have taken in the past. He argues we formed theories based upon facts and those theories are now universally applicable. Our theories are based on human behavior, and so there is a common human nature to which we can all appeal. This means that humans, no matter what, if placed in the same circumstances, will do the exact same things. He does not explain what exactly these “circumstances” are, but I find myself stating that he has erased a particular element of the history he professes to explain. That is the link between one period of history, and the one preceding it, as well as the historic period that proceeds from it. He treats the historic event in isolation, rather than as the culmination of historic trends. The circumstances to which he refers have no history, and so he conveniently ignores the whole context of the historic event.
Foucault and the Linguists
Foucault is well known for anyone with an education in either history, anthropology, or sociology. He is supposed to have revolutionized the field of history and the whole process of how we interpret the past and present. This is no longer a modernist position. We have strayed from the bounds of traditional liberal practice and come to a more prominent contemporary liberal history. The whole of this field of history becomes dominated by two different ideas, and on this note, it would be an interesting exercise to bring up a prominent example of this type of history.
The most sophisticated and probably the most popularly read of these postmodern histories is Dead Certainties, by Simon Schama. The book purports to be a book of history, and upon first inspection, the book is one of primary sources, for the most part, a narrative history. However, there are two types of fictions that he creates. He uses literary techniques in order to explain history. This in itself is not horrible. However, it leaves us with a dissatisfying conclusion. He has fabricated whole pieces of evidence from other pieces of evidence. He fabricated an account of the Siege of Quebec, and of the investigation into the murder of John Webster, namely a soldier’s account which did not exist, and purported to create a conversation between two people which was based upon imaginative account of how it may have happened based upon the primary sources. What is wrong with that? It lends credence to the account of the author, but the author provides another interpretive veil to reality. He creates from already biased sources the biased account, which purports to allow us one conclusion. The historian proclaims to narrate without bias. This is the sole purpose of the book, which satirizes this element of the study of history. [17]
Of course, this is an internal narrative. It is an internal debate within the historic field that is of little consequence to how most people view history. It plays one role. It creates the notion that history cannot be unbiased. It, of course, helpfully obscures the material and social position of the person that created the history. Foucault is so convinced that law is dictated to control our behavior, that he does not state his own particular position. His position is as a gay French man in the university. What importance does this have? Perhaps the way he relates to the classifications of his activity within society is determined by how his material activity occurs? His sensuous activity relates to his view.
Conclusion
We now know why the popular liberal historians call recent events unprecedented; it is because they refuse to self-analyze. Strangely, the whole process becomes an intellectual exercise. The reality of the situation is that these people live in a privileged position. I, too, live in a privileged position. However, I am not so naïve to think that my materially privileged position gives me any real understanding of history, or historical theory. Most often, the people who understand the most about the world are those who it destroys. It is the person living on food stamps in rural Missouri, the New Afrikan mother that cannot feed her children, the refugee from political violence who is yelled at to go back to their country. These people have perspectives, and they don’t really care about all this academic, heuty-teuty language. Is this directed at them? No. This is directed at those who look at events, take them in isolation, and extrapolate from this event a theory that has no relevance. It is directed, primarily at the mainstream news-media.
Their perspective on history is that this president, this administration, is “unprecedented.” They simply have not looked hard enough. In the 1990’s, and since then, white supremacist violence was, not only present, but a prominent part of life in some areas. In the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department, the police have routinely formed white supremacist groups within the police force, and complaints of this variety continue to this day. Police in Nebraska and Florida have had overt white supremacist ties to the KKK, and some Alabama officers have had ties to the League of the South. A member of a Michigan department attempted to join the KKK, and a police chief in Oklahoma and Maryland were revealed to express white supremacist sympathies, and would routinely modify police records or expunge racialized incidents from them. In most cases, the courts are unable to remove problem officers. This, of course, is not surprising. It is unlikely that a white supremacist justice system would support removal of its law enforcement allies. And most of these events have occurred between the period 2000 and 2019. [18]
The historic trend continues. It does not care what we take it for. Reality does not care about our pretenses and prejudices. The United States has marginalized and terrorized colonized communities for a long time, and will continue to do so, and has continued to do so regardless of politicians in power. The legitimate government has stood by and patched up the complaints, one by one, until the concerned politicians leave office. Then the less-concerned ones just ignore it.
Where does this leave history? History is not inflexible. Our own views of history are conditioned by our sensuous human activity; namely our actions within society. This is the way Marxists criticize both themselves and others. My class standing is as a member of the petty bourgeoisie, engaged on occasion in the trade of a facilitator of exchange. I am non-binary (this may of course change in the future), and I am also a settler; I have helped the lumpenproletariat engage in struggle against the landlord class. I seek to interact with the oppressed masses. These are my perspectives. And from here I view history.
History is not the acts of individuals within society. It is the action of a society of individuals. The social view is much more pressing than the individual view. Sure we could analyze the way that individuals live within their society; but ultimately that is conditioned by their society.
[1] Mao, “On Practice,” via marxists.org
[2] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, via marxists.org
[3] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto via marxists.org; Mao, “On Coalition Government,” via marxists.org.
[4] The first is borrowing Marx’s term from “Theses on Feuerbach,” where he describes how his philosophy is different from the previous materialist philosophies (via marxists.org). The second is a borrowing from The German Ideology (via marxists.org).
[5] Mao, “On Practice,” via marxists.org.
[6] If you really desire to read Althusser, the book I would recommend is On the Reproduction of Capitalism.
[7] Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution, via marxists.org.
[8] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology.
[9] For more information on standpoint theory, the theory I refer to stems from my understanding of “The Feminist Standpoint,” by Nancy Hartsock, a lesser known Marxist feminist, whose work on dialectical materialism is groundbreaking. See Nancy Hartsock, Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited, New York: Routledge, 1998.
[10] Mao, “Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership,” via marxists.org.
[11] John Emerich Edward, Lord Acton, “Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History,” accessible via online liberty library.
[12] Lord Acton, “Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History.”
[13] Dugald Stewart, quoted from his collected works, see “Dugald Stewart on History and Philosophy” on plato.stanford.edu.
[14] Unfortunately no web resource is freely available, but this is the introduction by Dugald Stewart to Adam Smith’s Essays on Philosophical Subjects, published in London in 1795.
[15] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, available here.
[16] Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse, p. 86, available from Semantic Scholar.
[17] Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).
