The Undivided Past (21 page)

The Marxist historians have also failed to establish their class-based interpretations of twentieth-century history. In
Mexico, the old regime of
Porfirio Díaz has been rehabilitated by recent scholarship, and the revolution of 1910–11 has been reinterpreted as a political rather than a social phenomenon, in which unified and conflicting classes played no discernible part.
¹¹⁵
Recent accounts of the
Russian Revolution of 1917 have downplayed the once-central class dimension, and the latest studies of the
industrial proletariat suggest that far from being
monolithic, it was deeply divided by the competing identities of social and
geographical origin,
gender, and
nationality.
¹¹⁶
In both cases, once-seductive transhistorical forces have been disregarded, collective
class identities have been denied and set aside, and the upheavals are no longer celebrated as the triumphs of cohesively virtuous and progressive social groups, but lamented as the destructive and illegitimate ma
chinations of rootless, unprincipled, manipulative, and amoral conspirators. Likewise, in the United States, the attempt to consolidate the history of
labor into one coherent, uplifting, heroic, and unifying narrative of working-class formation turned out to be unrealizable and unsustainable, for it soon became clear that it was a class that had always been “historically at odds with its own self,” exhibiting “an eclectic pattern of behaviour and belief that defined any attempt to identify a coherent vision or purpose among working people.” Meanwhile, new research has revealed that across the Pacific, the Chinese working class was similarly fissured and fractured along the lines of social origin, gender, and nationality.
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It is, then, no longer convincing to maintain that “the history of all hitherto existing society” is best understood and approached as “the history of class struggle.” To be sure, the pioneering Marxist historians opened up huge swaths of past human experience to serious scholarly investigation, and that will remain their abiding achievement. And there are some historians, mostly of the 1960s generation, who alternatively fear, lament, and deny “the death of Marxism,” continuing to insist that there was a bourgeois revolution in England in the seventeenth century and in France in 1789; that the “making” of the English working class did take place, albeit rather later than
Thompson claimed; and that Marxist history-writing still has a future in the twenty-first century. But the credibility and conviction have long since gone out of such outmoded enterprises and nostalgic claims.
¹¹⁸
The heroic narratives and broad generalizations that Marxist historians constructed have been overturned by the unprecedented research onslaught of the last twenty-five years, which means it is no longer possible to view the past as a succession of gigantic
Manichean encounters between rising, struggling, and falling classes, which have always been the preeminent forms of collective human identity,
driving the historical process inexorably forward. As long as the Soviet Union survived, Communism endured and some historians remained loyal to Marxism, but the demise of the Soviet Empire during the late 1980s effectively finished it off as a way of interpreting the past, and with its exhaustion also went the claims that class was the most important form of collective solidarity.
¹¹⁹

That, at least, has been the more realistic and resigned verdict of the older generation of Marxist historians.
Christopher Hill gradually redefined his notion of the bourgeois revolution as being an intellectual rather than a class-based upheaval, and during the
Thatcherite 1980s he shifted his attention from exploring successful progressives to describing “the experience of defeat.”
¹²⁰
Perry Anderson abandoned his multivolume Marxist history of the world before even reaching the era of so-called bourgeois or proletarian revolutions, and
Gareth Stedman Jones gave up on Marxism altogether. Even
Eric Hobsbawm, who had remained a member of the British Communist Party after 1956, admitted that times had changed. “Much of my life,” he has observed, “probably most of my conscious life, was devoted to a hope which has been plainly disappointed, and to a cause which has plainly failed: the Communism initiated by the October Revolution.” The best that could now be said for Marxist historians, he believed, was that they had “some practical experience of understanding the unintended and unwanted consequences of human collective projects in the twentieth century”; but that was hardly saying very much.
¹²¹
As the preeminent form of human identity and the most significant category of historical explanation, class has had a great fall and, like Humpty Dumpty, it seems unlikely that the pieces will be put back together anytime soon.
¹²²

The most measured conclusion is that the political activists and academic historians who followed the doctrines of
Marx and Engels, and who sought to apply them to understanding the future and the past, were as much in error as the two founding figures themselves had been, not only in overstating the importance of class as the most significant collective identity, but also in
underestimating the abiding importance of other forms of human solidarity, some quite ancient, others still emergent. This was certainly so in the case of
religion, about which
Victor Kiernan regularly (though without many allies) berated his Marxist colleagues, on the grounds that they did not take the subject, or the identities to which it gave rise, seriously enough. “To this day,” he lamented, in a review of
Eric Hobsbawm’s
Age of Revolution
, “Marxism has scarcely corrected this underestimation, or made sufficient allowance in its general theory, for the energy and tenacity of religion,” which he at least was willing to recognize was “one of the defining forces in human history.”
¹²³
It was a telling observation, yet this was an underestimation that went uncorrected, by both Marxist historians and Communist politicians, until it was too late.
Stalin may famously (or notoriously) have asserted that the pope “had no legions,” and that he, his faith, and his followers could be regarded with scornful indifference; but this was not the case in the late 1980s, when
John Paul II commanded a
Catholic population in
Poland that had retained its identity as
Communism had triumphed and subsequently crumbled, and that had refused to abandon its religious faith for this competing structure and system of belief.

This indifference on the part of Marxists and Communists toward the power and appeal of religion in human identity was particularly ironic, since as Engels had come to recognize toward the end of his life, there were strong and suggestive resemblances between
Christianity and Marxism, even as the followers of each saw those of the other as irreconcilably antagonistic.
¹²⁴
Both, after all, were built around a teleological narrative of history, which proposed collective solidarities in conflict, and led from an imperfect past and a sinful present to a glorious, redemptive, and transcendent future, in which good would triumph over evil. Both depended for their authority on sacred texts, written by the early prophets and about the early leaders, as sources of inspiration for the struggles, the sacrifices, and even the martyrdom expected of the faithful followers. Both suffered occasionally bitter internal schisms, caused by differences of doctrine and practice, which often seemed insignificant and incomprehensible to outsiders but led to accusations of
heresy and acts of excommunication. And
both held a Manichean view of the world, articulated in militantly denunciatory and apocalyptic language, in which antagonistic solidarities, based on a faith that subsumed and transcended all others, battled it out for supremacy. It is indeed a suggestive irony that Marxism and
Communism appealed to successive generations of self-styled secular progressives, while being no less a religion than Christianity in relying more on the appeal of faith and hope than on fact.
¹²⁵

Their preoccupation with
economic forces and material interests also helps explain why Marxists and Communists failed to recognize the attraction of
nationalism or the allure of national identities, not just to ruling elites but also to ordinary people, and to what the historian
Geoffrey Best memorably described as the “flag-saluting, foreigner-hating, peer-respecting” side of the plebeian mind. They persistently underestimated the extent to which
industrialization and economic growth, far from creating transnational classes, led instead to the intensification of national rivalries and solidarities. But they also underestimated nationalism because they did not like it and did not empathize with it.
¹²⁶
Isaac Deutscher claimed that Marx and Engels were great revolutionaries precisely because they were unfettered by the claims of nationality and had “seen the ultimate solution to the problems of their and our times, not in nation-states but in international society.” Members of the British New Left agreed: following
The Communist Manifesto
, they rejected the “narrow categories of ‘the national interest’ ” and dismissed nationhood and national identity as an instance of “the false identification of the group.”
¹²⁷
And in treating the history of nations and nationalism since 1870,
Eric Hobsbawm not only made plain his lack of sympathy with the subject, but also insisted that the power of national identity had always been overstated and that the belief that it was “an irresistibly rising force ready for the third millennium” was no more than an “illusion.” On the contrary, he saw national solidarities as merely one more instance of the
“politics of identity” that, by reason of “anachronism, omission, decontextualization and, in extreme cases, lies,” isolate one part of humanity from its wider setting. To all such solidarities and divisions Hobsbawm was deeply hostile—except in the case of class.
¹²⁸

Notwithstanding their contradictions and limitations, the collective identities of
religion and nation had existed long before Marx and Engels discerned the existence of
classes and proclaimed their unique importance, and they may continue to exist long after efforts to establish the politics of class identities and attempts to write class-based histories have been discredited and abandoned. But there is a third collective identity to which Marx and Engels, preoccupied by class, paid short shrift (although Engels did briefly address it toward the end of his life). For when, as they drew
The Communist Manifesto
to a close, the two collaborators urged that “working
men
of all countries” should “unite,” they showed no interest in the subject of female employment or indeed in the existence of any collective form of female identity.
¹²⁹
The Marxist activists who followed the founders were equally remiss: with the exception of
Rosa Luxemburg, no woman was a major Communist politician in the fifty years after the
Bolshevik Revolution. And later Marxist scholars were no less guilty.
E. P. Thompson may have claimed, in
The Making of the English Working Class
, that “class eventuates as
men and women
live their productive relations” (my italics), but scarcely any females appear in the ample pages of his very long book. And looking back on his essay “
From Social History to the History of Society,” Eric Hobsbawm could only note in “embarrassed astonishment” that it “contained no reference at all to women’s history.”
¹³⁰
In recent decades, class as identity has been undermined in many ways, and the claims advanced for the alternative solidarity of
gender have been among its most powerful solvents. Yet like religion, nation, and class, gender has its own limitations as a category of human solidarity, and it is time to examine those strengths and weaknesses.

IN 1825
, almost a quarter of a century before the authors of
The Communist Manifesto
announced that class was the preeminent form of
human solidarity, a wellborn and well-educated Irishman named
William Thompson had published a very different polemic, urging the primacy of an alternative collective identity, entitled
Appeal of One-Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery.
Like
Marx and (up to a point)
Engels, Thompson had rejected his privileged upbringing, but his evolving radical ideas had also been influenced by a woman named
Anna Wheeler, to whom he addressed his
Appeal
, and whose inspiration he acknowledged. “To separate your thoughts from mine,” Thompson wrote, “were now to me impossible, so amalgamated are they with my own.”
¹
Anna Wheeler had been married when she was fifteen, but having borne six children, she left her drunken husband and went to
France, where she joined a group of
Saint-Simonian
socialists. In 1820, her husband died, and Anna returned to England, where she embraced radical politics
and met William Thompson. In the same year,
James Mill published his
Essay on Government
, in which he argued for universal male suffrage but against enfranchising women, because they were all inescapably dependent on men, which meant they were incapable of forming considered views and so did not deserve to
vote; nor, since their interests were already represented by their fathers or their husbands, did they need to do so.
²