Marxism, Structuralism and Humanism

Abstract

If, for Marxist history, the 1950s and 1960s might be seen as a heroic age of discovery, the 1970s brought more uncertainty and less coherence to the project. Partly, Marxist history had become victim of its own success. Large numbers of academics were drawn under its influence and the tight spirit of comradeship and a common past in the CPHG no longer ensured the cohesion that it formerly did. Events of the late 1960s had radicalised a generation of students who enthusiastically took up history from below but also transcended it. Naturally enough, areas of inquiry widened and history from below helped to spawn new types of history: women’s history, gay history and the history of sexuality, cultural history and historical sociology. In some cases Marxists were at the forefront of these new histories as with Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden from History (1973), Tim Mason’s work on women in Nazi Germany and Marian Ramelson’s Petticoat Rebellion (1967). In others these developments emerged via a sharp rupture with Marxism: for instance, Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976). Some of these areas potentially reinforced Marxism but some discarded it, searching for alternative attitudes towards knowledge, social totalities and power. These fragmentary forces grew ever stronger as the character of the New Left — increasingly constituted in the late 1960s by specific social movements (the women’s liberation movement, the gay liberation movement, the black movement and the student movement) — had intellectual consequences. So even before the ideological climate changed in the mid- to late 1970s with the growing confidence of the New Right, Marxist history was facing a serious external challenge.

‘Marxism, as a theoretical and political practice, gains nothing from its association with historical writing and historical research. The study of history is not only scientifically but also politically valueless. The object of history, the past, no matter how it is conceived, cannot affect present conditions. Historical events do not exist and can have no material effectivity in the present. The conditions of existence of present social relations necessarily exist in and are constantly reproduced in the present.’

B. Hindess and P. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (1975)¹

‘Economists explain how production takes place … but what they do not explain is how these relations themselves are produced, that is the historical movement which gave them birth, M. Proudhon, taking these relations for principles, categories, abstract thoughts, has merely to put into order these thoughts, which are to be found alphabetically arranged at the end of every treatise on political economy. The economist’s material is the active, energetic life of man; M. Proudhon’s material is the dogmas of economists. But the moment we cease to pursue the historical movement of production relations, of which the categories are but the theoretical expression, the moment we want to see in these categories no more than ideas, spontaneous thoughts, independent of real relations, we are forced to attribute the origins of these thoughts to the movement of pure reason.’

K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847)