Abstract
Harold Wilson, the former Labour Prime Minister, once boasted that he had not got beyond the first page of Capital, implying that Marx was both impenetrable and no longer relevant. The impression that Marx is difficult to read is widespread. However, core propositions of Marxism are reasonably straightforward. After all, they were written for, and assimilated by, millions of working-class people in their most popular form, The Communist Manifesto (1848). This chapter seeks to explain Marx’s conception of history without recourse to unnecessary jargon. At the same time, it addresses the key technical terms which Karl Marx (1818–83) and his life-long collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–95) themselves employed.
‘The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humour, cunning and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call into question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn towards the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn towards that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.’
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)
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Notes
E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols (1994; 1st edn 1776);
G. Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1984; 1st edn 1744 ).
G. Tagliacazzo (ed.), Vico and Marx: Affinities and Contrasts (New Jersey, 1983); L. Simon, ‘Vico and Marx: perspectives of historical development’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 42 (1981), pp. 317–31.
A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford, 1976; 1st edn 1776), pp. 689–723.
F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in One Volume (1991), p. 614;
D. McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (St Albans, 1976), p. 95; M. Löwy, ‘The poetry of the past: Marx and the French revolution’, New Left Review, 177 (1989).
F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minnesota, 1984), p. xxiv.
J. Rees, Algebra of Revolution: the Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition (1998), pp. 75–8.
F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford, 1993 ).
F. Engels, Letters on Historical Materialism 1890–4 (Moscow, 1980), pp. 7–8.
R. Levins and R.C. Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA, 1985);
S.J. Gould, An Urchin in the Storm (1990), pp. 153–4;
R.C. Lewontin, S. Rose and L.J. Kamin, Not in our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature (New York, 1984).
G. Childe, What Happened in History? (Harmondsworth, 1946), pp. 7–13.
There is a debate over the role of the productive forces. Rigby sees Marx as possibly a ‘productive force determinist’: S. Rigby, Marxism and History: A Critical Introduction (1987), pp. 27–55;
A. Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social Theory (1987), pp. 42–64;
G. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1979);
H. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (London, 1995 ), pp. 232–41.
T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1996; 1st edn 1798 ).
Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology (student’s edn, 1991), p. 45.
J. Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (1997), p. 149.
P. Fryer, Black People in the British Empire (1989), pp. 61–5.
P. Siegel, The Meek and the Militant: Power and Religion across the World (1985), for a general Marxist history of religion.
K. Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in D. McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Early Texts (Oxford, 1971 ), pp. 122–3.
K. Marx and F. Engels, Holy Family,or the Critique of Critical Criticism, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 4: 1844–45 (1975), p. 93.
H. Beynon, ‘Class and historical explanation’, in M. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification (1992), p. 232.
J. Kochanowicz, ‘Between submission and violence: peasant resistance in the Polish manorial economy of the Eighteenth Century’, in F. Colburn (ed.), Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1989), pp. 34–63.
G. Brown, Sabotage: A Study in Industrial Conflict (Nottingham, 1972 ).
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© 2002 Matt Perry
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Perry, M. (2002). Marx and Engels’s Conception of History. In: Marxism and History. Theory and History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-1379-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-1379-1_3
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