This project, “Back to the Conjuncture: The History of ‘History from Below’,” lays the preliminary groundwork for the history of ‘history from below’. ‘History from below’, broadly construed, is a type of historiography that claims that history ought to be written from the standpoint of ordinary people rather than elites.
This method has a history, one that originates with Marx and historical materialism, emerging from his critique of the mysticism of Hegel and German idealism more broadly. Marx’s understanding of historical materialism unfolds through several of his short works. “The German Ideology” (written late spring of 1846; first published in 1932) marks an early start towards a systematic materialist theory of history and ideology. Following the first inklings of revolution in 1848, Marx brings historical materialism to bear on social reality through various works, including “The Communist Manifesto” (1848), “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), “Civil War in France” (1871), and culminates in Capital (1867).
With Marx as this project’s anchor, I take two of his claims to be definitive of ‘history from below’: (i) class struggle between two antagonized classes constitutes the motor force of history; and (ii) the proletariat standpoint is the privileged point of view of the capitalist social formation because its experience of exploitation, as a class of workers at the thumb of the bourgeois class, reveals the inhumane conditions produced by the capitalist social formation. In total, Marx’s claim is that ‘the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself’.
European and North American communists cheered on successive twentieth-century triumphs –– from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the 1949 Chinese Revolution, the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and the national liberation struggles that gripped most of Africa throughout the ‘50s. It was a remarkably global century of communist and anti-colonial struggle that occurred first in Russia –– not in Germany as Marx had imagined –– before spreading to China, Vietnam, India, Pakistan (former West Pakistan), Bangladesh (former East Pakistan), Africa, and Latin America.
Marx’s proletariat, the free-born Englishman, did not emerge from the twentieth-century as the primary or exclusive revolutionary subject. Historical materialism, as Marx had conceived it, was due for its own transformation. ‘Domination’ began to supplant labour exploitation as a central analytic category because it is simply more capacious –– domination accounts for wrongs that will persist once the capitalist mode of production ceases. If exploitation is the analytic category that corresponds to the economic base, and domination corresponds to superstructure, then this shift from exploitation to domination is of certain interest. Indeed, few polemicists wager that the New Left’s historical materialism may be no historical materialism at all because the Marxist concept of class experiences a de-prioritization vis-à-vis a non-exhaustive list of social identities (e.g., Ellen Meiksins Wood).
While a dissatisfaction with the concept of ‘agency’ in vogue today had first led me to its origins in the New Left and the elaboration of ‘history from below’, the ‘motor force’ of this project was, ultimately, an aversion to Meiksins Wood’s critique of the same New Left and my own confused sympathies that I desired to work through. I imagined that I would produce a rough genealogy of ‘history from below’, since Marx’s historical materialism. The greatest challenge might just be this gigantic scope. Between the vexed nature of interdisciplinary work and theorizing cross-disciplinary phenomena, threading each string together, and reckoning with the project’s decisive focus on the European and North American Left, there were no shortage of quandaries. Although resolved for the sake of ARIA’s closing, these problems remain open questions as my work continues to be in-progress.
This research project has been a longtime ‘dream’ project of mine. Doubtless, my summer research was exceptional preparation for the Intellectual History Ph.D. I wish to pursue next. Thank you, Professor Roberts, for agreeing to take this on, for your precious time, and the lively intellectual discussion this summer. Thank you, Mr. Mark Gallop, the Research Group on Constitutional Studies, and Professor Roberts again for so generously funding my ARIA project. Last, but by no means least, a tremendous thank you to everyone at the Arts Internship Office — Jade and Anne, I will single you out by name — for your continued support and for making ARIA possible.
