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Matt Perry
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THEORY AND HISTORY
Marxism
and History
Matt Perry
Second edition
Theory and History
Series Editor
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University of Roehampton, London, UK
Theory and History is an exciting new series designed to provide teachers
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Matt Perry
Marxism and History

Second Edition
Matt Perry
School of History
Classics and Archaeology
Newcastle University
Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Theory and History

ISBN 978-3-030-69510-1 ISBN 978-3-030-69511-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69511-8
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Acknowledgements
This book has gestated over a long period of time and benefited from formal
and informal education. One central claim of Marxism is that involvement in
current events and political struggles allows insight into the historical process.
My own experience confirms this proposition. I owe a debt of gratitude to
the outstanding individuals who have taught me about history and politics:
Frank Henderson, the women from Trentham pit camp, the striking ambu-
lance drivers, signal workers, and Timex workers, those in the Heathtown Anti-
Poll Tax Union, in the campaigns against the nazis in Bloxwich and Cannock,
in the anti-war protests and the comrades in the union branches of Wolver-
hampton, Sunderland and Newcastle Universities. Part of Marxist history’s
enduring legacy is to attempt to register the efforts of such people. I would
like to express my appreciation to David Martin, Mike Haynes, Terka Bagley,
Don MacRaild, and John Charlton for their support and for their patience with
the draft version of this book. Also, thank you Christine together through both
editions of this book.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
The Basics 3
Three Generations of Marxist History 4
Conclusion 7
2 Marxist History’s Wide Panorama 9
Old and New History 9
The Long and Short of It 14
Revolutions 16
Concepts and Theory 19
Distorting Marxism 22
Stalinism and Marxist History 23
Conclusion 28
3 Marx and Engels’s Conception of History 29
History and the Enlightenment 29
Can Human History Be Scientific? 31
The Distinctiveness of Human Labour 34
The Forces of Production 35
Social Relations of Production 36
The Clash Between the Forces and the Relations of Production 37
Base and Superstructure 39
The Role of the Individual in History 42
Class and History 44
Conclusion 46
4 The Historical Writings of Marx and Engels 47
Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 48
Engels’s Peasant War in Germany 52
vii
viii CONTENTS
Capital, Volume I 57
Engels’s Letters on Historical Materialism 60
Conclusion 63
5 The Second Generation and the Philosophy and Writing
of History 65
Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution 65
Antonio Gramsci’s Contribution: Hegemony, Folklore
and Anthropology 72
Gramsci on Hegemony and Popular Consciousness 73
Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness 77
Reification and Bourgeois History 78
The Possibilities of Marxist History 81
Conclusion 84
6 Rescuing the Poor Stockinger: History from Below 85
Communist Party Historians’ Group (1946–56) 85
Christopher Hill 90
England’s Bourgeois Revolution 90
‘The Revolt Within the Revolution’ 92
E.P. Thompson 96
Eighteenth-Century English Culture 98
Thompson’s Wider Impact 100
Conclusion 104
7 Marxism, Structuralism, and Humanism 105
Structuralism and Marxist History 106
Thompson’s Critique of Structuralism 109
Evaluations I: Base and Superstructure 116
Evaluations II: Science 120
Evaluations III: Class 122
Conclusion 123
8 Marxism and Postmodernism in History 125
What Is Postmodernism? 125
The Postmodernist Gauntlet 128
Postmodern Method 128
Postmodern Knowledge 131
Writing Postmodern History 135
The Marxist Critique of Idealism: Theories of Language
and Knowledge 136
Language 137
Knowledge 140
Marxist History and Postmodernism 142
Totalities, Opposites, and Praxis 146
CONTENTS ix
9 Conclusion 153
Endnotes 159
Further Reading 177
Glossary 181
Index 191
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
‘Who’, asked a BBC poll, ‘is the greatest thinker of the millennium?’ Karl
Marx topped the list.1 Another survey, this time of the United States of Amer-
ica’s Library of Congress—the world’s largest library—found that, with nearly
4000 works, Karl Marx was the sixth most written about an individual (Jesus
Christ came first and Lenin third).2 For all his celebrity, Karl Marx remains an
enigma; in the words of Engels’s eulogy the ‘best hated’ man of his times.3
And one difficult to overlook: for some a genius, for others a monster; his
legacy an elusive riddle, either an Orwellian nightmare or a world rid of
exploitation and oppression; his ideas, either bankrupt or immanently relevant.
Whatever their view of Marx, few would dispute that some of the greatest
historians of the past few decades have described themselves as Marxists and
that this philosophy has exerted a profound impression upon history and social
science. Marx has endured. As George Iggers noted, the work of Marxist
historians alone is an insufficient index of Marx’s contribution to history as
a discipline. Much of his influence came indirectly through modern social
theorists who, like Weber, defined themselves in opposition to Marx.4 Eric
Hobsbawm, one of the world’s most renowned historians, even asserted that
Marx was ‘the main force in “modernizing” the writing of history’.5 Equally,
Marx has undoubtedly remained academic history’s ‘best hated’ thinker.
Presently, few works specifically address Marxist historiography. The univer-
sity library shelves strain under the weight of basic introductions to Marx,
or discussions of Marxist theories of society, alienation, economics, class, and
so on. But there is little written specifically about Marxist historical writing.
Stephen Rigby’s Marxism and History examined Marx’s theory of history
whilst paying less attention to his historical writing. Likewise, Alex Callinicos’s
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
M. Perry, Marxism and History, Theory and History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69511-8_1
2 M. PERRY
Making History elaborated Marx’s philosophy of history not how he applied

that framework to interpret past events. Harvey Kaye’s well-known primer
concentrates on the British Marxist historians. Broadening the geographical
scope of such works, Q. Edward Wang and Georg G. Iggers’s Marxist Histori-
ographies: A Global Perspective surveyed national and world-regional traditions
of Marxist historiography emphasising academic Marxism and thereby tilting
towards scholarship after the Second World War. None of these books exam-
ines the historical writing of key early Marxists along with academic Marxist
historians of the past few decades. An important lacuna therefore exists in the
study of Marxism and history.
If Marxism encompassed all those who have described themselves as such,
then this book would be unmanageable. Instead this is an attempt to discuss
Marxist history from some of its best examples, a critical but constructive
synthesis. Marxist history encompasses such a broad genus of writers rendering
a comprehensive account impossible. Selection is therefore necessary but is not
simply on a practical note, also being required to rescue the spirit of Marxism
from those who falsely bear its name.
This book introduces both the Marxist view of history and Marxist histor-
ical writing. It is aimed primarily at history students less attuned to sociological
and philosophical primers for Marxism. I intend to avoid the dual snare
of either ‘dumming down’ or lapsing into jargon and technical shorthand.
Terminology, sparingly used, is explained in the glossary.
My purpose is to acquaint the reader with the key themes of Marxist histor-
ical writing. As this is not the terrain where neutrals are easily found, I do not
feign disinterest. As a Marxist, a historian, and an educator, my own position
locates me as a minor participant in this school. The strength of this sympa-
thetic vantage point is that the themes of this book are ones that I routinely
grapple with myself. The weakness is that I am open to the criticism of soft-
soaping Marxism. Anticipating this charge, two points suffice here. Firstly,
Marx’s method, if faithfully applied, is a critical and sceptical one that subjects
its premises to the scrutiny of doubt and the test of practice. Secondly, there
is no virtue, from a Marxist viewpoint, of presenting an idealised unrealistic
version of Marxism that would not stand up in a basically hostile intellectual
environment. My goal therefore is to explain Marxism, within the constraints
of the textbook format, in a critical and rigorous manner, considering the
challenges of, for instance, Stalinism and postmodernism (see glossary).
With Marx, first impressions count. Too often, students are stranded in a
dark and sinister labyrinth. In the shadows lurk unfamiliar terminology, ugly
translations and silhouetted figures whose exotic and menacing names are
whispered without explanation. Whilst Marxism can be made very complex
and technical, the basics are relatively straightforward and, it might be argued,
connect with our own experiences of life. Whereas Chapter 2 deals with this
in greater depth, here is a short elaboration of Marx’s views on society.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
The Basics
Marx’s most rudimentary observation was that labour set humans apart from
the animal kingdom. Adult life for most people on the planet has always
consisted of a daily routine of toil. The French slang rhyme ‘do-do, go-go,
boulot ’ (sleep-commute-work) captures this in contemporary form. Who we
are and how we are perceived are wrapped up to a considerable extent with
the labour we perform. For instance, the question ‘what do you do?’ invites
an answer that explains what you do at work (‘I’m a teacher’), or why you
do not work (‘I’m a student’ or ‘I’m a pensioner’). Although work varies
enormously both today and in the past, labour is like the DNA of human
history—ever-present, imperceptibly shaping and reshaping society.
For much of human history, labour has consisted of gathering, scavenging,
and hunting in small egalitarian bands. Past a certain point in history, that
all changed. As labour became more productive with such innovations as
settled agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals, communi-
ties produced a surplus above and beyond the bare necessities of food, shelter,
and clothing. From this moment, it was no longer necessary for all to work
because some individuals or groups could live by the work of others. After this
profound transition, human societies divided into rulers and ruled, exploiters
and exploited: class-based societies emerged.
Class society is so integral to our experience that we do not usually give
it a second thought or, if we do, we accept it as normal or natural—the boss
at work, the stark contrasts between rich and poor, a social ‘pecking order’
entangling class, gender, and race, even the authority of the university prin-
cipal or the school head—these are all expressions of a society divided by class.
As regards exploitation, the humdrum of work-a-day life masks how others
benefit from our toil through profits, dividends, and executive bonuses. Even
the term ‘exploitation’ in common parlance means exceptionally low wages
rather than the norm. For Marx, exploitation was literally daylight (and legal)
robbery conducted not by a masked highwayman but by every employer, every
lord of the manor, and every slave master. Crucially exploitation does not
go unchallenged. Because of it, classes have opposing interests. Whilst ruling
classes in history may want lower wages or greater tribute or harder work
on the plantation; the exploited want the reverse. Class conflict is therefore
inherent to class society, hence the famous opening line of The Communist
Manifesto: ‘the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class
struggle’.
This is not to say that things have always been the same. Far from it.
Contemporary global capitalism is very different from Ancient Rome or Ming
China or the Great Zimbabwe. As human technology, knowledge, and skills
have advanced, society has become more complex. To understand these great
epochal shifts, Marx again scrutinised what was happening to labour, exploita-
tion, and production. In Ancient Rome, the exploitation of slave labour
predominated; in medieval France, feudal lords exploited serfs (peasants of a
4 M. PERRY
servile status); in modern capitalism, large capitalist employers exploit people

who are personally free but work for a wage. Different class divisions, forms
of conflict, levels of productivity, and historical possibilities belong to these
different phases of social and economic development. History can be divided
accordingly into modes of production: the ancient or slave mode, the feudal
mode, the capitalist mode, etc. After a long human odyssey, taking many
different paths, passing through, and combining different phases of develop-
ment, we have ultimately reached modern capitalist society. Because of the
abundance created by capitalist society, Marx and Engels maintained that this
mode of production opened the new possibility of a classless society: socialism.
They devoted their life’s work to this goal.
Three Generations of Marxist History

Entering active politics in the 1840s, Marx and Engels might be consid-
ered the first of three broad ‘generations’ of Marxists, roughly equivalent to
the human life span. There is a historical and intellectual logic to treating
the Marxist tradition in three epochs. Different ages are shaped by different
great events. They have different illusions and a different spirit of the times.
Marx and Engels witnessed the spectacular growth of smoke-stack and railway
capitalism in a world dominated by European empires. In politics, socialism
eclipsed liberalism as the most significant revolutionary ideology and mass
trade unions and socialist parties grew across Europe. The middle generation
of Lukacs, Trotsky, and Gramsci had to grapple with quite different problems
in an age of extremes. They witnessed two world wars, the Russian revolu-
tion (as well as its degeneration) and the depression of the 1930s. In contrast,
the third generation had to make Marxism relevant to a world dominated by
Cold War divisions, a long economic boom, radicalisation in the 1960s, and
reaction in the 1980s. The fall of communism and the triumphalist claims of
neoliberal exponents of global capitalism marked the close of the third gener-
ation. The twilight of the third phase leaves us wondering about the dawn of
a new fourth generation of Marxist historians, under what conditions it might
develop and prosper, and what signs exist at present.
The book is thus organised to deal with how Marxism as a system of
thought has altered with the changing tempo and character of world history
of the last hundred and fifty years. Despite this evolution, Marxism embodies
strong elements of intellectual continuity and there is an intergenerational
coherence to its historical methods and analyses. This chapter plots the land-
scape of Marxist history identifying notable achievements as well as its sheer
range and the great contrasts of subject matter, style, and method. Like this
text in general it is intended as a gateway to a wider body of scholarship. It
would be impossible to do justice to the analytical disputes over these works
and also provide a guide to such a spectrum of writing. Whilst the ensuing
chapters concentrate in the main on particular texts, this chapter is intended
1 INTRODUCTION 5
to indicate the dimensions of the Marxist school as a whole. These dimen-

sions are significant because they reveal Marxism’s value and flexibility as a
tool of historical research. Some Marxists have excelled at traditional forms
of historical research; others have innovated. Marxist historians have exam-
ined the history of ‘great men’ or history from above as well as turning
traditional history on its head and giving a voice to the common peoples
of the past in all their unruly diversity. Marxist historians have scrutinised
both long- and short-run historical developments in addition to history at
the macro- and the micro-level. They have contributed to the theoretical and
conceptual development of history as a discipline just as they have conducted
pioneering empirical research. This diversity is more than the result of random
selection of research projects but stems from Marxism’s very character which
stresses the importance and connections of contending elements of human
history. Marxist history’s recent malaise does not therefore derive primarily
from deficient research. It has much more to do with the changing intellec-
tual climate, institutional context and most importantly the fallout of Stalinism
and collapse of the Eastern Bloc. These issues are raised especially the relation-
ship between Stalinism and Marxist history and they are returned to in the
following chapters.
After the opening survey of this chapter, more detailed chapters begin
with Marx and Engels. It would be wrong to underestimate the pertinence
of history to Marxism. Marx and Engels did not consider history to be a
distinct subdivision of their thought; their view of the world was historical in
essence. That is, they attempted to conceptualise and explain the entire human
experience in a historical sense. Hence historical materialism has become
synonymous with Marxism. Academic historians are so used to the division
between ‘theory’ (asking what history is) and ‘practice’ (researching the past)
that it is all too easy to ignore their connection for Marx and Engels. Mindful
of this, Chapter 2 outlines the Marx and Engels’ theory of history. Starting out
with their intellectual background, the chapter considers in turn: the dialectic,
the role of labour, class struggle, gradualism and revolution, progressive phases
of development, and structure and agency.
Chapter 3 addresses the other side of the theory/history equation: Marx
and Engels’s historical writings. The connection between the theory and prac-
tice of history in their work is an often neglected but vital insight. How theory
shaped their historical practice makes Marx and Engels’s approach to history
comprehensible. Measured thus, rather than by selective quotation, much of
the vulgar criticism of Marxism (that it is economically reductionist or denies
human agency) simply melts into nothing. This chapter selects Marx’s Eigh-
teenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, volume I of Capital , Engels’s Peasant
War in Germany and his late correspondence concerning Marxism and history
collected together as the Letters on Historical Materialism. These constitute
rich case studies of Marx and Engels’s historical writing. This is far from an
exhaustive list and a wider study would have to include Marx’s Class Struggles
in France, his writings on India, Ireland, and America, Engels’s writings on
6 M. PERRY
Germany, military history and Christianity. This selection necessarily excludes

important examples that have been drawn into contemporary historiograph-
ical debates, such as postcolonial interpretations of Marx’s writings on India. I
have tried to indicate in my references where to follow up on these debates. My
selection aimed to provide a strong grounding in how Marx and Engels wrote
history. They did not just meditate abstractly upon history but applied their
theory to historical research and writing. Indeed, these two aspects developed
hand in hand. Practice has a second sense for them not just meaning historical
writing but political activism: history was not simply a distant past but also a
contemporary process which Marx and Engels sought to shape.
Chapter 4 discusses the second generation of Marxist historians. Those
selected—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), and
Georg Lukacs (1885–1971)—probed new areas of historical inquiry and
refined Marx’s original vision of history in the light of their experiences of war
and revolution. Others—Plekhanov (1856–1918), V.I. Lenin (1870–1924),
Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952), Walter
Benjamin (1892–1940), C.L.R. James (1901–1989), W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–
1963)—also made important and original contributions. The former three
were chosen because they have a strong present-day relevance to history, both
in terms of their continuing legacy and their insights into the issues that domi-
nate the agenda of history today. Even when we consider these three, we
have to be ruthlessly selective, not being able to discuss for example Trotsky’s
contemporary historical writing of the 1930s or his discussion of culture and
everyday life. Perhaps most pertinently, this generation had to confront the rise
of Stalin which has become a theoretical and historical issue that cannot simply
be wished away. All three had a different relationship with Stalinism; all in
different ways avoided its worst distortions. Gramsci made a vital contribution
to theoretical issues such as class consciousness, anthropology, and culture.
Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness (1923) and Lenin (1924) constitute
major contributions to the Marxist theory of history and collectively form a
systematic philosophical treatment of the history of ideas. Trotsky’s History
of the Russian Revolution (1930) was the most impressive piece of historical
writing within the Marxist tradition up to that point, some would argue even
to the present.
In Chapter 5, we encounter the third generation of Marxist historians,
those who emerged from the ashes of the Second World War. In 1946, the
Communist Party Historians’ Group was formed. It assembled some of the
most talented historians of both their generation and the Marxist tradition as
a whole. Their imaginations would enrich social history with novel approaches
and methods. Here we concentrate on two prominent members of the group:
Christopher Hill and Edward Palmer Thompson. Both contributed to the
formation of history from below; both achieved unparalleled status in their
respective fields. Both this and Chapter 6 devote considerable, perhaps dispro-
portionate, attention to E.P. Thompson. This is a necessary misfortune. In
English-speaking academia and beyond, the consideration of Marxist history
1 INTRODUCTION 7
in the past few decades centres on Thompson; and his influence has been
immense. The Making of the English Working Class (1963) more than any
other work acted as a manifesto for history from below. Indicative of this
status, Wang and Iggers’s book on global Marxist historiography cites Thomp-
son’s influence from the USA to India to Latin America to the Middle East. A
discussion of Thompson’s legacy is therefore indispensable to understand the
current state of play for Marxist history.
Chapter 6 examines the debate that emerged amongst British Marxist histo-
rians. Thompson and socialist humanists (that is the proponents of history
from below) measured themselves against the structuralism inspired in part
by Louis Althusser. These arguments surfaced first in the mid-1960s being
rekindled more dramatically in the late 1970s. The contested positions have
shaped the writing of Marxist history since and the chapter retrospectively eval-
uates the principal controversies. Given the acrimony, it would be tempting to
think that these vituperations spawned Marxist history’s current malaise. The
episode certainly scarred Marxist history but grander reasons contributed to
its loss of momentum. The primary reason is the more inhospitable intellectual
and academic climate towards Marxism, turning into a veritable ice age during
the years of Thatcher, Reagan, and the new right. The structuralist-humanist
collision acted as a prelude to a much greater assault on Marxist history in the
1980s and 1990s in the shape of postmodernism.
Chapter 7 reviews the Marxist response to the postmodern challenge
to history. From the 1970s, poststructuralism has influenced the historical
agenda with its greater concern for the role of language, representation, and
a scepticism about the possibility of historical knowledge. Sometimes the ‘lin-
guistic turn’ describes this agenda. It combines bold, seemingly menacing,
statements from theorists with the new conceptual approaches of practising
historians. In an ironic twist of ideas, Marxism is both a major target of post-
modernism and one of its major progenitors. But postmodernism’s field of
fire is much wider than Marxist history alone; history as a discipline is caught
in the crossfire. Such Marxists as Alex Callinicos and Bryan D. Palmer have
defended realist approaches to history (Marxist history included). Indeed,
possibly because they have so often been the targets, Marxists have persuasively
countered postmodernism’s theoretical claims.
Conclusion
In the quest for historical knowledge, nothing can be taken for granted. An
inquiry into Marxist historical writing should begin with the most fundamental
question. Given the time-scale, geographical diffusion, and scope of research,
are the Marxist historical school and classical Marxism valid categories? Their
utility has to be proved as does the school having internal coherence and
shared approaches. Are these categories simply a flag of convenience? Clari-
fying this common core—and whether it has continuing relevance—are this
book’s foremost tasks.
CHAPTER 2
Marxist History’s Wide Panorama
Old and New History

To assess Marxist historical writing is to survey Marx’s long shadow. For
a school of history so often accused of reductionism and determinism,
Marxism more than any other (only the Annales is nearly comparable)
embodies diverse approaches and subjects. Though the British Marxist histo-
rians of the post-Second World War era have been associated with ‘new
history’, Marxism also embraces traditional forms such as biographical,
political, intellectual, and narrative history. A host of exemplary Marxist
biographies could be assembled: Isaac Deutscher on Stalin or on Trotsky,
Paul Frölich’s Rosa Luxemburg, Maxime Rodinson’s Muhammad, Christo-
pher Hill’s Cromwell or Milton, Dorothy Thompson’s Victoria, and Georges
Lefebvre’s Robespierre or Napoleon.1 Prefacing the final volume of his
Trotsky trilogy, Deutscher explained the interaction between great events and
individuals: ‘It was as if a huge historical conflict had become compressed into
a controversy and feud between two men [Trotsky and Stalin]’. Deutscher
detailed the tragic persecutions of Trotsky’s family from the revolutionary’s
letters to his loved ones which ‘added a sombre depth to the drama’.2 What
distinguishes Marxist biography is a greater theoretical clarity about the indi-
vidual in history: the great puzzle for every biographer to solve. Indeed,
the non-Marxist Ian Kershaw borrowed from Marx, following Tim Mason’s
advice that every biography of Hitler should start from Marx’s The Eighteenth
Brumaire:
Men do make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.3

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As for traditional history’s concern for narrative style, both the storyteller’s
art and literary eloquence are present in many Marxist works. C.L.R. James’s
Black Jacobins (1938) or Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution
(1930) could hardly be accused of exchanging literary sensibility for jargon.
Like the narrative art or biography, Marxist history also contains exemplars
of high politics and history from above. Tim Mason’s Social Policy in the
Third Reich (1977) or Charles Maier’s Recasting Bourgeois Europe (1975)
or John Saville’s 1848 (1987) takes the elite perspective to illuminate class
struggles under Hitler, Europe after the Great War and at the apogee of Char-
tism, respectively. Again, like biography, these are also distinct from traditional
approaches conceptually, being less concerned with statesmanship and more
with the actions of rulers, states, and governments as protagonists in a battle
of wits, ideas, and strategy between classes.
One commonplace accusation against Marxism is that it overplays economic
history. Unsurprisingly then Marxism produced important and popular works
in this field. Explaining the seemingly inexplicable depression of the 1930s,
Leo Huberman’s Man’s Worldy Goods (1936) provided a widely read Marxist
economic history and critique of the ‘natural laws’ of bourgeois economics.
Harry Braverman’s highly influential Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974)
charted the deskilling and alienating processes of capitalist mass production in
both the factory and office. Both works owe a great debt to Marx’s Capital
which exposed the workings of the new world of capitalism in terms of polit-
ical economy and history.4 Marxist historians have intervened in major debates
about the economic aspect of society, notably the transition from feudalism to
capitalism (of which more later) and the standard of living during the British
industrial revolution. More recently, comparing the first phase of globalisation
(1870–1914) with the present, Beverley Silver’s Forces of Labour (2003) iden-
tified how globalised capitalism cannot simply eliminate the power of labour
as a pessimistic neoliberal consensus suggested.5
Whilst not rejecting traditional approaches, Marxist history has during the
last century also innovated. History from below (see Chapter 5) subjected
ordinary people and their struggles to historical scrutiny, having a profound
effect on social history. Battling against the victor’s intentional suppression of
past struggles in the popular memory, John Saville summarised the task of
history from below in relation to Chartism:
A radical movement draws essential sustenance from the inspiration of its past
struggles and its past heroes; but who was to honour the poor half-mad
O’Connor on Kennington Common, leading his gullible followers to ridicule
and execration? What was quite forgotten was the strength that continued in
Chartism in the months that followed the events of 10 April, and even the
memory of the mass arrests and jailings were wiped from public memory. The
contemporary agencies of the media were extraordinarily effective in traducing
this greatest of all mass movements of the nineteenth century; but when all is
said the almost complete obliteration of Chartism from public consciousness in
the middle decades of the century remains a remarkable phenomenon.6
2 MARXIST HISTORY’S WIDE PANORAMA 11
Despite criticism of Marxism in these fields, Marxists were consequently

amongst the pioneers of women’s and black history. Sheila Rowbotham’s
Hidden from History (1973) opened up the field of radical women’s history. A
foremost historian of Chartism, Dorothy Thompson emphasised class, women,
and the Irish within the movements of the 1830s and 1840s. Some gender
historians have continued to use Marxist concepts as part of their method-
ological toolbox. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes
examined the English middle class in Birmingham and East Anglia during the
era of the industrial revolution. The work had a profound influence in its treat-
ment of sexuality as a product of its society and its time rather than a given,
arguing for a ‘gendered conception of class’, drawing on a Gramscian notion
of common sense, and his focus upon everyday life.7 Just as Thompson had
outlined how the English working class came to identify itself as having sepa-
rate existence so too did the middle class placing ‘themselves in opposition
to an indolent and dissolute aristocracy, and a potentially subversive working
class’.8 Family Fortunes observed how religious ideology sanctioned the sepa-
rate spheres within everyday life for men and women. Middle-class Victorian
Britain developed a domestic ideal of womanhood and Victorian masculinity
belonged in a wider public world of commercial progress and entrepreneurial
initiative; these gender identities pervaded day-to-day routines. For the middle
class, property, family enterprise, and ‘improvement’ underpinned these social
constructions. From a methodological perspective the authors believed that
Marxism explained that separate spheres served the interests of the rulers:
Separate spheres were seen as due neither to cultural accident nor to biolog-
ical determinism, but as ‘social constructions camouflaging social and economic
service, a service whose benefits were unequally shared’. This form of anal-
ysis provided a route out of the Whiggish account of inexorable progress
culminating in the granting of female suffrage.9
Their careful non-reductionist reading of Marx emphasised the ‘circuit of

production with its necessary reproduction of labour power, of distribution
and exchange, and [that] this reminds us of the full cycle of capital and thus
the central importance of consumption. That process of social reproduction
depends on the family and women’s labour, a form of labour which, however,
is hidden by its categorization as private’.10 A dialogue between Marxism
and feminism exists in the work of several historians of women and gender.
Barbara Winslow’s biography of Sylvia Pankhurst revitalises the feminism, anti-
imperialism, and Marxism of the suffragette leader. By scrutinising the daily
and generational social reproduction of labour within the family, Lise Vogel
drew feminism and Marxism together theoretically.11
Marxists C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, and Eugene Genovese’s work on
black slavery and Peter Fryer’s Staying Power (1984) on the black expe-
rience in Britain played a similar role in black history. W.E.B. Du Bois
emerged as a remarkable early historian of race in the USA.12 Du Bois’s Black
12 M. PERRY
Reconstruction (1935) examined how the American Civil War unleashed an

anti-racist dynamic with African-Americans gaining the vote in the South and
constitutional rights. White American historians of his day opined that the ‘car-
petbagger’ and the ‘scalawag’ personified the corrupt northern vindictiveness
of radical reconstruction (1867–77). These same historians disguised the ugly
reality of white supremacy, lynch law, and segregation that followed recon-
struction as a justly restored ‘home rule’ for the South. Du Bois dissected
the racist premises of this work. Instead, Du Bois explained that the North
owed the victory to American blacks, that their activities cemented the
union after the war, that black enfranchisement was a colossal historical step
towards democracy and that the counter-revolutionary disenfranchisement of
the African-Americans in the South made the ‘colour line’ the great social
divide of twentieth-century America. The classic work inspired Marxist histo-
rians such as Herb Apotheker and Eric Foner. Marxist historians continue
to contribute to the history of race. Theodore Allen pinpointed the ‘inven-
tion of the white race’ in the responses of plantation owners to the rebellion
of black slaves and poor whites.13 David Roediger adapted a Marxist frame-
work his analysis of the ‘wages of whiteness’ that racially divided the American
working class. Returning to Du Bois and challenging Roediger’s cultural-
psychological emphasis, Brian Kelly examined the tensions between white
supremacy and working-class interracialism within the Alabama miners’ union
that in five strike waves between 1890 and 1920 united across the colour line
and threatened the prerogatives of the white mine-owning elite.14
Historians across the world emulated the history from below approach.
Civil rights agitation and Vietnam radicalised a generation of historians.
Many of these were non-Marxist; others were explicitly Marxist; others still,
Marxist-influenced but preferring the American label ‘radical’. Howard Zinn,
a participant in and educationalist of the civil rights movement, wrote A
People’s History of the United States (1980) a general history ‘disrespectful
of governments and respectful of people’s movements’ to counter existing
histories that ‘understate revolt, overstate statesmanship, and thus encourage
impotency in citizens’.15 Perhaps the most noted of these Marxist histo-
rians is Eugene Genovese whose work on black slavery mirrored Thompson’s
stance towards base and superstructure, hegemony, and class. His Roll, Jordan,
Roll (1974), a history of slavery in the USA, showed how history from
below could be extended beyond the confines of the traditional labour move-
ment. Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750–1925
(1976) is another case of a path-breaking history written by an American
Marxist of the Thompsonian stripe. Arguing against American exceptionalism,
David Montgomery’s Fall of the House of Labor (1987) charted the American
working class’s arching militancy during the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries and its fall after 1920–2. A Marxist influence appeared in the
historiographies of post-slave societies of the Caribbean and Latin America,
traversing a route from an earlier generation concerned with slavery as a mode
of production and underdevelopment to histories of everyday slave experience
and resistance.16 Equally, history from below was a notable ingredient in the
birth of Subaltern Studies in India, in South African labour history, and in
histories of popular movements in the Middle East.
In another correlate of history from below, Marxists also helped to develop
oral history. Marxist historians Ronald Fraser, Alessandro Portelli, and Luisa
Passerini used oral history to refresh conventional thinking on the Spanish
Civil War, the Kentucky coalfields, or Italian Fascism through reviving the
subjectivities and meanings of the past for protagonists.17 They continue to
shape fields within oral history such as deindustrialisation.18
Culture—encompassing art and everyday life—has since the 1960s become
the centre ground of historical research. Here again Marxists have made their
mark. F.D. Klingender’s Goya and the Democratic Tradition (1947) fascinat-
ingly sets Goya’s paintings in their context of Enlightenment and revolution.
Paul Siegel, Terry Eagleton, and Victor Kiernan have interpreted Shakespeare
from a historical materialist perspective.19 Both E.P. Thompson and Christo-
pher Hill have examined great poets—Milton, Marvell, Blake—as a social
barometer of their times. In 1958, Hilton re-examined the Robin Hood
legend. Anticipating today’s concern for myth and representation in history,
Hilton argued that what mattered more was not that Robin Hood existed but
that.
one of England’s most popular literary heroes is a man whose most endearing
activities to his public were the robbery and killing of the landowners, in
particular church landowners, and the maintenance of guerrilla warfare against
established authority represented by the sheriff.20
In the feverish agrarian discontent of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,

English peasants dreamed of Robin Hood. They aspired to the egalitarianism
of Robin’s band that chose its own leader and escaped the backbreaking
routine of agrarian toil. More recently Christopher Hill’s Liberty against the
Law (1996) connected the seventeenth-century revival of Robin’s popularity
with those who saw the law and the enclosure movement trample on their
liberties and rights. Marxist historians scrutinised the peasantry in revolutions
and then in everyday life, helping to shape an emerging field of historical
inquiry.
E.P. Thompson helped to prompt greater concern for and wider defi-
nition of culture. His studies of eighteenth-century plebeian customs such
as wife sales and rough music, fashioned a dialogue with anthropology to
construct the bridgehead of new cultural history. Michel Vovelle, the French
Marxist historian, also engaged with the history of mentalities in his studies
of death, revolutionary festivals, and the dechristianisation campaign during
year two of the French revolution (1793–4). His Mentalities and Ideologies
(1990) proposed a productive exchange between Marxism and the history of
mentality. As Vovelle remarked, the Marxist Georges Lefebvre’s Great Fear
(1932) helped to launch histories of popular belief or mentality. Marxist
14 M. PERRY
history has proved itself able to innovate and engage in a productive dialogue
with new historical approaches. In the relationship between Marxism and new
history, Guy Bois struck the right note, ‘it is a matter of union, it is also a
matter of combat’.21
The Long and Short of It

If some Marxists have turned towards cultural history and the micro-
scale, others have selected the longer time frame. These distinctions have
contributed to the (at times exaggerated) differences between ‘humanism’ and
structuralism within Marxist history. Marx’s concept of the mode of produc-
tion has been tremendously suggestive for these latter studies. Owing much
to Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), the
archaeologist Gordon V. Childe’s What Happened in History (1942) explained
the origins of civilisation, agriculture, and class society. D.D. Kosambi’s highly
influential An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956) applied the
Marxist approach to the broad sweep of social development on the subcon-
tinent offering a ‘history without episodes’, challenging the condescension of
European historians. Chris Harman tackled the equally ambitious project of a
world history from a Marxist perspective in The People’s History of the World
(1999). Geoffrey De Ste Croix’s Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World
(1981) elaborated a Marxist interpretation of Ancient Greece and Rome. His
themes—the importance and definitions of class and class struggle, compar-
isons of Marx and Weber, the nature of slavery, the dynamics of particular
modes of production, and Marxism’s explanatory power—transcend his book’s
chronology.22 De Ste Croix returned to Edward Gibbon’s great question at
the heart of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). Rome,
according to De Ste Croix, succumbed to crisis because of the limits of its
slave system of exploitation. Over time, most reserves of new slaves dried up
resulting in slave labour costs spiralling. As this was the Roman ruling class’s
principal source of wealth and power, the whole edifice of Roman civilisation
crumbled.
From one civilisation’s decline to its successor’s rise, Chris Wickham, Perry
Anderson, and Guy Bois have on the genesis of European feudalism.23 As
well as critically evaluating Marx’s concept of the Asiatic mode of produc-
tion, Chris Wickham participated in the ‘Feudal revolution debate’ in the
journal Past and Present in the 1990s.24 In two review articles, he appealed
for Marxist historians to engage in the long-run and comparative issues
addressed by the historical sociologists Michael Mann and W.G. Runciman.25
In his Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005), Wickham identified with great
geographical comparative insight (north Africa, Europe, and the Middle East)
a widespread but uneven ‘peasant mode of production’ when aristocratic
dominance was at its lowest ebb (500–800) although the latter was never
totally eclipsed. When Rome collapsed as the centre of Western European
and Mediterranean civilisation, the successor aristocracies did not simply disap-
pear with the barbarian invasions. The early middle ages were a time of class
struggle and only towards the end of the period did aristocratic power become
ascendant.26 In The Inheritance of Rome (2007), Wickham drew on archaeo-
logical and historical sources in a historical materialism combining economic
and social structures with cultural life and the power of social classes. Proving
that Marxists can be excellent sceptics of received wisdom, he countered the
two dark ages grand narratives: firstly, the teleology of early medieval king-
doms as incipient nation-states; or secondly, how darkness, barbarians, and
ignorance summed up these centuries before the rebirth of classical learning
in the later medieval and early modern period.
Rodney Hilton became synonymous with the Marxist study of medieval
Europe, ranging from the peasant revolts, the feudal mode of production, to
feudal crisis (an often neglected ingredient in the rise of capitalism). Guy Bois
too sought to explain the feudal crisis in classical Marxist terms as a clash
between the forces and relations of production in his study of fourteenth- and
fifteenth-century Normandy.27 In these works, Marxists contest demographic
(or ‘Malthusian’) and monetarist interpretations of the collapse of fourteenth-
century European society.28
Since Maurice Dobb’s path-breaking Studies in the Development of Capi-
talism (1946), Marxist historians have discussed the transition from feudalism
to capitalism. Perry Anderson’s Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974) outlined
absolutism’s historical function, the role of Roman law, and the key differences
between absolutism in Eastern and Western Europe.29 Whilst Marx and Engels
referred to absolutism as a state that balanced the interests of the bourgeoisie
and the aristocracy, Anderson stressed its defence of the nobility. Continuing
these themes, David Parker applied a Marxist view of absolutism to the French
state in The Making of French Absolutism (1983).
A Marxist debate on the transition emerged with Paul Sweezy’s challenge
to Dobb’s account. Sweezy, an American Marxist, equated capitalism with the
rise of the towns and the market, disputing Dobb’s emphasis on the relations
of production.30 Robert Brenner, another American, rekindled the discussion
arguing that the differential pattern of lord-peasant class struggles in Europe
determined the pace and location of capitalist development (the Brenner
debate). In Brenner’s account, class struggle displaced other elements of tran-
sition taking particular issue with the productive forces as a factor.31 He also
wrote of London merchants during the English Civil War, zooming in to the
revolutionary moment within the larger process of transition.32 Concerned
with the relations of production, Marxists, such as Peter Kriedte and Hans
Medick, have also contributed to the scholarship on proto-industrialisation (a
first phase of pre-factory mass industry based on homeworking) within the
emergence of capitalism. Adopting a global approach, Immanuel Wallerstein
considered the extension of capitalist markets into world system generating
an advanced Western European core and concentric geographical periph-
eries. These scholars had an impact well beyond Marxist historians. Finally,
16 M. PERRY
counselling caution about modes of production, Jairus Banaji challenged the

formalism and abstraction of history moving teleologically forward in neat
exclusive stages. This mechanical understanding derived from the Second
International and Stalinism also being symptomatic of structural Marxism (see
Chapter 6).33
As well as modes of production, the forces of production or aspects thereof
have also conceptually prompted Marxist history. Some studies employ the
forces and relations of production in combination, others such as histories of
science or technology spotlight the former. The discovery of Engels’s Dialec-
tics of Nature in the 1920s provoked a long-running argument over science
and Marxism. Dialectics posited that nature itself was dialectical and dissected
contemporary scientific thought suggesting its theoretical shortcomings. This
encouraged Marxists to study the history of science. The popular science
writers of the British Communist Party provide two classic examples: J.D.
Bernal’s Science in History (1954) and Joseph Needham’s Science and Civil-
isation in China (1954). With great insight Helena Sheehan’s Marxism and
the Philosophy of Science (1993) summarised the debate over science within
Marxism up to the Second World War. Controversies continue: some have
maintained the forces of production generate a vulgar deterministic Marxism
and distinguish between Marx and Engels or different faces of Marx on this
point; others have disputed the scientific status of Marxism or history.
A major dispute amongst historians of India occurred over the forces of
production. Morris D. Morris prompted controversy when he stressed that on
the arrival of British imperial rule the productive forces within Indian society
were already stagnant rather than domestic manufacturing being destroyed
and resources drained away at British hands. He thereby proposed that the
Raj signified progress rather than debilitating Indian development as Indian
nationalists claimed. Perhaps the most telling intervention into this debate
was that of the Indian Marxist Irfan Habib. He found in Mughal India strong
evidence of the very same productive forces that led to the development of
capitalism elsewhere.34 He revealed significant merchant capital, hired labour
in agriculture, capitalist farming patterns, and putting out systems. However,
the growth of urban markets depending on merchant capital could not find
self-sustaining markets in the countryside. Ultimately, the limits of Mughal
India’s agricultural production stifled these elements.
Revolutions
For self-evident reasons, Marxist historians gravitated towards history’s great
revolutions. Chris Harman and Pierre Broué have both studied the failed revo-
lution in Germany in the years 1918–23.35 Trotsky’s most important historical
work took 1917 as its subject. C.L.R. James brought the Haitian slave revolu-
tion (1791–1804) to life. Christopher Hill and Brian Manning have developed
rich and varied writings on the English Civil War. Kristin Ross penned a
history of May 1968 in France and its ‘afterlives’ from a perspective inspired by
Rosa Luxembourg’s view of mass strikes.36 Adolfo Gully produced a history

of the Mexican revolution. Marxists, such as Gilbert Achcar as well as Anne
Alexander and Mostafa Bassiouny have written powerful accounts of the Arab
Spring of 2011.37 Marx himself wrote on the revolutions of his day: the revo-
lutions of 1848, the Spanish revolution (1854), the Indian Uprising (1857),
the American Civil War (1861–5), and the Paris Commune (1871). Friedrich
Engels’s Peasant War in Germany (1850) discussed the revolutionary events
of 1525 (see Chapter 3).
The French Revolution has attracted more interest from Marxist scholars
than any other historical event. It is not difficult to comprehend why.
The French Revolution was an event with global implications, a contin-
uing contemporary reference point for French identity and for the analysis
of subsequent revolutions. Marx devoted time to the study of this revolu-
tion and wished to write his own history of the Convention (the revolu-
tionary assembly). This study acquainted him with historians (Adolphe Thiers,
François Mignet, Augustin Thierry, and François Guizot) who analysed the
events of 1789–1815 as class struggles. In a letter to Weydemeyer, Marx
acknowledged that it was not he that discovered the classes and class struggle
but these bourgeois historians.
For much of the twentieth century, the social interpretation of the French
Revolution—which stressed the intractable crisis of the rulers, the class
character of the events, and profound consequences of these revolutions—
dominated the historical literature. Though the social interpretation was
widely accepted, some of its leading practitioners were Marxists, its analyt-
ical categories owing much to Marx. Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul
(1914–82) (both members of the French Communist Party) elaborated from
the 1920s the authoritative ‘social’ account of the revolution.38 Now the
evolving balance of social forces not great men—the Robespierres, Dantons,
and Napoleons—explained the course of the revolution. Rather than being
an irrational, wild or criminal ‘swinish multitude’, as British conservative
Edmund Burke (1729–1797) believed, the urban poor, the peasants, and the
crowd drove revolutionary events, exercising morality and reason, lending the
revolution’s radical phase a popular-democratic quality.39
Reaching across six decades, Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul, George
Rudé, and Michel Vovelle have written general histories of the French Revo-
lution from an explicitly Marxist perspective. Each has also contributed
distinctively to the methodological and empirical research agendas of the revo-
lutionary period. Georges Lefebvre’s The Great Fear (1932) studied the panic
that radicalised the countryside in 1789, pioneering the history of emotion and
mass psychology in the flow of events. Under Lefebvre’s supervision, Soboul
carefully scrutinised the revolutionary urban poor in The Parisian Sans Culottes
and the French Revolution (1964). Soboul succeeded his mentor as the revo-
lution’s leading historian. George Rudé and Eric Hobsbawm asserted that
Lefebvre pioneered history from below emerging in the English language
18 M. PERRY
historiography via Rudé’s work on the ‘crowd’ in France and on John ‘Lib-
erty’ Wilkes (1727–1797) along with Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels (1959).40
Another British Marxist, Richard Cobb’s People’s Armies (1961–3) produced
a monumental study of the popular revolutionary armies as instruments of
terror created during the radicalism of 1792–4. Finally, in this survey of the
Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution is Michel Vovelle, Soboul’s
heir apparent.41 The French Revolution also stages the opening scene in Eric
Hobsbawm’s multi-volume world history. From the ‘dual revolution’ of the
late eighteenth century (the industrial revolution and the French revolution)
to the present, this constituted a remarkable feat. Hobsbawm captured the
successive phases of world capitalism as the ages of revolution, of capital, of
empire, and of extremes.
Despite the orthodoxy of the social interpretation, a Cold War revisionism
(of Alfred Cobban and George Taylor) gathered force in the mid-1970s with
François Furet’s polemical ‘re-think’ of 1789. The academic focus shifted from
a social to a political interpretation, from 1789 as a bourgeois revolution to a
sequence of accidents with political ideas forcing history to ‘skid’ off course.42
The attacks on the Marxist history of the French Revolution redoubled as the
two hundred years anniversary approached. Jonathan Clark, the conservative
historian, delighted at the return of the political interpretation: ‘Meanwhile
the tumbrils roll through the street to collect the old guard [of historians]
and Marx’s head is carried aloft by the mob, stuck on a pike’.43 (It is worth
noting in passing that Christopher Hill and the social interpretation of the
English Civil War were subjected to analogous revisionist critiques.) Equally,
several works have rescued both the French Revolution from the revisionist
assault. Eric Hobsbawm’s Echoes of the Marseillaise (1990) assessed the French
Revolution’s place in world history and responded to revisionism. McGarr and
Callinicos’s Marxism and the Great French Revolution (1989) also sounded
a Marxist counterpoint to the consensus through reaffirmation of the social
interpretation and a theoretical and comparative defence of bourgeois revo-
lution. Neil Davidson provided a broad-based survey regarding bourgeois
revolutions, encompassing the revolutionary ideas that animated them, their
diverse configurations, the much-debated social profile of revolutionary actors,
the social nature of the revolutions, and crucially their truly revolutionary
consequences. For Davidson, these outcomes or consequences justify the cate-
gory of bourgeois revolution, hence being known as the ‘consequentialist’
approach. The revolutions (the Dutch revolt, the English Civil War, the Amer-
ican and French Revolutions) were thus indispensable to the emergence of
the modern capitalist world. As such, Davidson offers a comprehensive and
sophisticated response to revisionism’s dismissal of bourgeois revolution.44
Whilst revolutions occupy a special place in historical materialism, Marxist
historians have also sought to understand their obverse: counter-revolution.
Christopher Hill’s Experience of Defeat (1984) examined the defeated hopes
and ideological turmoil of the radical levellers and the religious millenarians
after the English revolution’s highpoint had passed. Likewise, John Saville’s
1848 surveyed Chartism’s last great upsurge when the English state mobilised
its military might to defeat the movement. Arno J. Mayer became the foremost
Marxist historian of counter-revolution, adroitly mining this historiographical
gap. For him, revolution and counter-revolution generated and demarcated
modern political ideologies; with conservatism, reaction, and fascism consti-
tuting a family of counter-revolutionary ideas. Mayer’s approach influenced a
Marxist variant of intellectual history. Thus, Cory Robin demonstrated how
contemporary conservatism’s ‘racism, populism, violence, and […] pervasive
contempt for custom’ were there at its birth in the backlash against the
French revolution as it sought to construct a ‘broad-based movement of elites
and masses against the emancipation of the lower orders’.45 Enzo Traverso
explained the violent intensity of European ‘civil war’ (1914–45) through
both revolution (Trotsky or Benjamin) and counter-revolution (Schmidt or
Heidegger) being intellectually supercharged.46
Concepts and Theory

Key concepts inform, even define, Marxist history. These include relations
of production, class struggle, mode of production, and hegemony. With
the development of academic Marxism since the Second World War, Marxist
and non-Marxist history’s boundaries have blurred considerably. It is on the
conceptual level that eclectic borrowings from Marx are at their greatest. Many
historians selectively adopted certain Marxist categories as fruitful tools in their
assumptions, methods, interpretations, or explanations. The mode of produc-
tion category provides one such illustration. The French Marxist Guy Bois
described mode of production as the ‘key concept’ of Marxist history and
noted that this idea had a profound effect upon the great medievalists of the
Annales school, George Duby and Jacques Le Goff. R.S. Neale too viewed
the mode of production as Marxist history’s chief category. Others, notably
E.P. Thompson and Robert Brenner, have asserted that the primacy of class
struggle; Thompson even arguing that class struggle was more important than
class. Research agendas also excluded particular concepts. Several historians
who privileged class struggle also rejected base and superstructure: the view
that the socio-economic relations are more fundamental than and influence
the realm of politics and ideas.
Marxist concepts have helped historians to ask new questions, sometimes in
old fields of inquiry. But this conceptual agenda has not been static. Innovation
can be observed, for example, in the studies of nationalism from the 1980s.
Benedict Anderson, Terence Ranger, and Eric Hobsbawm’s work on nation-
alism and nationalist myths transformed understandings of national identity.
Modern nation states ‘invented tradition’ (or the mystique of permanence)
through symbols, ceremonies, and practices, such as coronations, anthems,
and flags. Such shared familiar references created the impression of unity and
forged ‘imagined communities’ into a nation from masses of people who were
essentially strangers.47 Such writings inspired transnational history and the
20 M. PERRY
concept of ‘methodological nationalism’ or how the most pervasive hidden

assumption distorting history is that of the naturalness of the nation state.
Marxists have continued to contribute to the theory of history. Marx and
Engels’s writings on this subject were both extensive and highly sugges-
tive. The German Ideology (1845–6), The Communist Manifesto (1848), The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), the Preface to a Contri-
bution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Socialism: Scientific and
Utopian (1880) and their correspondence all prominently feature historical
theory and method. Marxism’s middle generation resumed these interests
with Lukacs providing a systematic Marxist philosophy of history in History
and Class Consciousness (1923). Reflecting on the continuing relevance of
Marxist theory, R.S. Neale, Christopher Hill, and Victor Kiernan elaborated
Marxism’s value in historical research and analysis together with its contribu-
tion to twentieth-century historiography.48 Hobsbawm’s On History (1997)
constituted a substantial historiographical exploration, ranging from post-
modernism to the Russian Revolution. For Hobsbawm, Marx provided the
‘essential base’ of historical investigation, because of his unique attempt ‘to
formulate a methodological approach to history as a whole, and to envisage
and explain the entire process of human social evolution’.49 Likewise de Ste
Croix observed Marxism’s utility regarding Ancient Greece and Rome:
Marx’s analysis of society although devised in the course of an effort to under-

stand the mid-nineteenth-century capitalist world, resulted in the construction
of a set of concepts which work remarkably well when applied even to the
Greek and Roman world and can be used to explain many of its features and
developments – the total destruction of Greek democracy over some five or six
centuries, for example, and even the age-old problem of ‘the decline and fall
of the Roman empire’ or let us rather say ‘the disintegration of quite a large
portion of the Roman empire between the fourth and the eighth centuries’.50
Theoretical discussions have turned polemical as with E.P. Thompson

‘humanist’ indictment of Althusserianism and structuralism in the Poverty
of Theory (1978) and in public dispute with Richard Johnson in the History
Workshop Journal . This debate uncomfortably straddled the theorist–practi-
tioner division with Thompson taking on theorists at their own game. Despite
this, Thompson articulated a certain scepticism towards theory once describing
himself as a ‘Marxist empiricist’ implying that Marxist historians should be
happiest as practitioners. Perry Anderson, Thompson’s protagonist, has more
than anyone else combined the theorist and the practitioner. Alongside his
long time frame structural histories of the rise of feudalism and the absolutist
state, he has written several major theoretical works on the Marxist philosophy
of history.
A crucial distinction exists between practising historians who write history
and theorists who write on the philosophy of history, of which there is also
a voluminous literature. In Marxism’s middle generation, Lukacs, Gramsci,
and Benjamin are three such examples. Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy
of History (1940) were a poetic and provocative attack on social democracy
and historicism. Benjamin contended that Marxist history’s purpose was to
offer the working class ‘a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’.
These dangers were all too apparent in Benjamin’s Germany of lost revolutions
and Hitler’s consolidation of power. Benjamin’s diverse writings offer much to
historians working on memory, consciousness, time, photography, technology,
consumption, and culture.
Non-Marxists have engaged in great contests with the Marxist theory of
history. Karl Popper’s Poverty of Historicism (1957) was a thoughtful empiri-
cist critique of Marxism and Geoffrey Elton’s Practice of History (1967)
launched a broadside against ‘new’ and Marxist history. More recently histor-
ical sociologists such as Anthony Giddens, W.G. Runciman, and Michael
Mann and postmodernists such as Hayden White, Jacques Derrida, and Michel
Foucault criticised the Marxist theory of history. Stephen Rigby’s Marxism
and History (1987) sharply scrutinised Marxist history, borrowing from the
techniques of literary criticism. For Rigby, many ‘textually authorised Marxes’
could exist so consideration of ‘what Marx actually thought’ should be
abandoned.51 Marxists might reply that this is to ignore that Marx’s work
was indisputably purposive, being a guide to the drama of human emanci-
pation. From within the Marxist camp, G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of
History: a Defence (1978) attempted to reconstruct Marx’s theory of history
as a coherent whole. His orthodoxy engendered charges from other Marx-
ists of technological determinism and doctrinaire defence. Perry Anderson’s
Arguments within English Marxism (1980) raised the pivotal issues that have
emerged for Marxist (and non-Marxist) historians: structure and agency, base
and superstructure, amongst others. His Considerations of Western Marxism
(1976) delineated a genealogy of classical Marxism carefully excluding the
pretenders of the late Second International and Stalinism. Alex Callinicos also
pondered the major theoretical objections to the Marxist view of history in
Making History (1987). He surveyed both the trends within Marxism, from
Cohen to analytical Marxism, as well as rival theoretical schools (empiri-
cism, historical sociology, and postmodernism). Callinicos revisited this last
preoccupation in Against Postmodernism (1989) and Theories and Narratives
(1995) offering a trenchant riposte to an increasingly confident historiograph-
ical trend. As agendas change over time, philosophers of history have widened
their focus to encompass ecological crisis, the return of fascism, and the
shifting prevalent ideas in a neoliberal world. Istvan Meszaros has argued that
the neoliberal orthodoxy is incapable of seeing beyond the present, hence the
widespread notion of the end of history. For him, the left therefore carries the
‘burden of historical time’, as sense of history that is capable of understanding
the scale of the crisis confronting humanity and the need for system change to
address it.52
22 M. PERRY
Distorting Marxism
Marxist history is all too often misrepresented through theoretical caricature,
one that bears little semblance to Marxist historical writing. For the English
Tudor scholar Geoffrey Elton, Marxism as a doctrine ‘stultifies the study of
history by reducing history to a repository of examples selected or distorted
to buttress the scheme’.53 Across the Atlantic, Gertrude Himmelfarb worried
that Marxists were yoked to the ‘formidable burden of ideology’ which acted
as a ‘predetermined schema that applies to all periods and all events’.54 Empiri-
cist to postmodernist quarters accuse Marxism of economic reductionism,
determinism, schematism, even in the case of the latter, of empiricism.
Opponents deduce their criticisms from what they take to be Marxist theory,
which is usually based on a handful of vulgarised assumptions. They overlook
how Marxism’s most able historians have sensitively applied and refined that
theory. Such criticism amounts to little more than, as Michel Vovelle succinctly
observed, ‘vulgar critics of vulgar Marxism’. Thus, analysis of Marxist histor-
ical writing is an indispensable and neglected part of the relationship between
Marxism and historiography.
Increasingly, academic Marxism has provided its own framework of refer-
ence. Reassessments of the founders of Marxism are too easily brushed
aside as dogmatic exercises in holy scripture. Some thinkers, following this
dismissal of what Marx actually said, have metamorphosed into the butterfly
of ‘postmarxism’. In part, this is an adaptation to the ‘fall of communism’, in
part the climate for left-wing academics began to change after the enthusiasm
of 1968 began to wane in the mid-1970s (see Chapter 7). Postmodernism,
historical sociology, and empiricism all seriously challenge Marxist histori-
ography—and when historical journals produce special editions on ‘the crisis
of social history’ or ‘the end of labour history’, it is Marxist history that
is implicitly challenged. Some trends of ‘Marxism’ have abandoned its core
defining characteristics both in terms of political practices as well as in historical
method. Dismayed by the self-proclaimed Marxists of his day, Marx exclaimed,
‘All I know is that I am not a Marxist!’ A crucial dimension of the Marxist
historical tradition has been to reassert Marx’s method in order to reject the
advances of false friends.
Assessing the Marxist tradition poses a methodological problem. A ‘history
of ideas’ approach would look at the level of pure thought and its devel-
opment without the complications, accidents, and contingencies of historical
events. Such an idealist approach to history is unable to explain the evolu-
tion of an intellectual tradition being especially pronounced where Marxism
is concerned. The temptation is to disconnect intellectual history from the
evolving historical context, to link one thinker to the next in a daisy chain
of thought. Just as Charles Darwin (1809–82) cannot be held responsible for
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) who transposed the former’s evolutionary idea
of the survival of the fittest onto human society, so should we be aware that
Marx cannot be culpable for Stalin’s part in history, or at least not without
a fair trial. Hindsight dangerously equates original thinkers with those who
vulgarise and distort their ideas. With this caution counselled, it is necessary
to authenticate, like the art expert would a Rembrandt, the provenance and
consistency of an intellectual tradition. This discriminating approach allows
us to assess Marxism’s contribution to historical writing. It is my contention,
though I am not alone, that Marxism is only a viable intellectual tradition
by defining criteria that reject some self-styled ‘Marxisms’ (notably Stalinist
approaches). The practices of Stalinist regimes, parties, and historians funda-
mentally contradict Marxism’s basic emancipatory propositions. For Marxism
to be meaningful, these approaches should be excluded. Thus, opponents who
routinely elide Stalinism and Marxist are making a category error.
Here politics and history walk together if not necessarily in step. Political
drift away from Marx has habitually entailed divergences from his histor-
ical method. The first major example of this arose as Marx and Engels’s
influence on the Second International faded, when a biologically or tech-
nologically deterministic version of historical materialism spread through the
socialist parties of Europe through such thinkers as H.M. Hyndman (1842–
1921), Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), and Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932).
Secondly, with the rise of Stalin, Marx’s original historical vision became an
indecipherable blur. Trotsky described this as the ‘Stalin school of falsification’.
Stalinism and Marxist History

What passed for Marxism became the official religion of the Soviet Union and
in turn Eastern Europe, China, and various other parts of the globe. From
being the ideas of the labour movement or persecuted revolutionaries it was
transformed into its opposite, a state ideology. George Orwell, the English
socialist, wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) a withering critique of the
Soviet Union. Nothing encapsulated the social function of history under Stal-
inist rule so accurately as his phrase, ‘Who controls the present controls the
past. Who controls the past controls the future’.
A sharp antithesis exists between the best Marxist works and the history
most influenced by Stalinism. Though the pace differed, the decline of Marxist
history in the Soviet Union coincided with the rise of Stalin. In the 1920s,
when Lenin’s successor was not settled, history in the Soviet Union flour-
ished. During the New Economic Policy, intellectual and cultural life recovered
from the devastation of war, revolution, and civil war. The situation was very
different from the intolerant dogmatism associated with Stalin’s 1930s. In the
previous decade, party historians were willing to work with non-Marxist histo-
rians. As Russia’s leading Bolshevik historian Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovskii
stated non-Marxist hands would help to construct a communist culture.
Despite this, as early as 1922, Pokrovskii was drawn into the factional struggle
that was ultimately to consolidate Stalin as Russian dictator. The target of
Pokrovskii’s intervention was Trotsky with whom he disagreed over the char-
acter of Russian absolutism. Close to Bukharin and the ‘right’ faction of the
24 M. PERRY
Central Committee, Pokrovskii again stepped into the debate over the rela-
tionship between Lenin’s theory of revolution in Russia between 1905 and
1917 and Trotsky’s thesis of permanent revolution. In late 1924, Pokrovskii
confirmed Stalin’s fraudulent assertion that Lenin believed that socialism
could be built in one country. The following year, the Central Committee
commissioned Pokrovskii and the Institute of Red Professors to produce a
history of the Russian Revolution, being published in 1927. His relatively
sympathetic biographer highlighted the contradictions within the account. Its
interpretation of Lenin was ‘dubious’ and ‘questionable’ and its remarks about
Trotsky ‘scurrilous’. Reconciling Lenin to both anti-Trotskyism and to Stalin’s
‘socialism in one country’, Pokrovskii obscured Lenin’s evolving attitudes
between 1905 and 1917, ignoring Lenin’s intellectual watershed of 1917 in
favour of the possibility of socialist revolution in Russia, and failing to explain
the sharp Party disagreements that this produced.55 In order to suggest conti-
nuity between Lenin and Stalin, Pokrovskii also omitted all Lenin’s passages on
the necessity of revolution in the West for the survival of socialism in Russia.
The debate over the October revolution lasted until 1931 and illustrated
Stalin’s tightening grasp on power. Increasingly, the slightest challenge to
Stalin’s distortion of Lenin was identified as Trotskyite heresy, ending with
Stalin’s invective against historical debate, which he equated with ‘rotten
liberalism’ and which he wanted ‘gagged’. Stalin’s outburst targeted the
unfortunate Slutskii who had dared to state the obvious: that Lenin had under-
estimated the moderation of pre-war German Social Democracy. Stalin’s tirade
decried the fundamentals of history itself and marked the effective death knell
of anything resembling the classical Marxist approach to history in the Soviet
Union:
Is it not perfectly clear that by his talk of the inadequacy of the documents
Slutskii is trying to cover up the utter inadequacy and falsity of his so-called
conception? Let us assume that, in addition to the documents already known,
a mass of documents were found containing, say more resolutions of the
Bolsheviks urging the necessity of wiping out centrism. Who save the hope-
less bureaucrats can rely on documents alone? Who, besides archive rats, does
not understand the necessity that a party and leader must be tested primarily by
their deeds, and not by their declarations?56
Accordingly, the masses vanished from 1917 as makers of their own history,
now visible only when Lenin and the party herded them like the sheep in
George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Photographs were doctored, histories falsified,
and historians were tightly controlled. Stalin personally censored historical
works and falsified events. Historical interpretation became a blunt instru-
ment in factional disputes or to find historical precedent for the vilification
of the kulak (the richer peasant). Even more astonishingly, Soviet historians
eulogised the ‘great men’ of the Russian monarchy, Peter the Great and Ivan
the Terrible. The great film-maker Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) illustrates
the creeping Russian nationalism and leadership cult in Soviet history. His
earlier works Battleship Potemkin (1925), Strike (1925), and October (1927)
lionised the people and documented the revolutionary actions of workers,
sailors, and the Petrograd masses. His later epics, Alexander Nevksy (1938)
and Ivan the Terrible, Part One (1945), resurrected old nationalist myths for
the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and to flatter Stalin. Like Bolshoi ballet dancers,
historians had to toe an inconsistent and shifting party line. They had to avoid
a catalogue of heretical deviations: objectivism, romanticism, cosmopolitanism,
bourgeois methodology, and idealism. To err was human; ‘to the Gulag’, the
General Secretary’s response. During the 1930s, even Pokrovskii’s orthodoxy
was officially denounced as anti-Marxist.
As the Stalinist system spread across Eastern Europe, similar mutilated
versions of Marxist history developed. For example, the German Democratic
Republic (DDR) demanded that historians wrote material that was politically
relevant, using history to legitimise the regime and to promote a national
consciousness that highlighted historical episodes that took Germany progres-
sively closer to its socialist future. The promulgation of scientific laws of
history became a substitute for historical explanation. The DDR historians
also sought to challenge West German interpretations of national history and
to influence the West German working class at which they were spectacularly
unsuccessful.57 What resulted was a dull rigid teleology in which the major
issues were the fine-tuning of socio-economic periodisation and the positivistic
elaboration of the laws of history. Equally in Communist China, rulers have
taken an intense interest in the past, disseminating a form of world history
that charts the inevitable victory of socialism over capitalism and the neces-
sity of the Chinese revolution. Shifts in historical interpretation match policy
turns rationalising, for example, the Sino-Soviet split and the events of the
cultural revolution.58 Even with the Glasnost period in the Soviet Union, old
habits died hard, as the rehabilitation of the Bolshevik leader and economist
Nicholai Bukharin (1888–1938) offered historical precedent for Gorbachev’s
market socialist reforms.
Whilst a few Eastern European Marxist historians such as Witold Kula and
Boris Porshnev established reputations beyond the iron curtain, the richest
Marxist historical writing in the twentieth century—from Trotsky’s History
of the Russian Revolution (1930) to E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English
Working Class (1963)—started methodologically by rejecting Stalinism. Some-
times the Stalinist-Marxist distinction blurs when the influence of Stalinism
is present but not total, as with the British Communist Party Historians’
Group or such individuals as Georges Lefebvre or Eric Hobsbawm. At least,
these historians by their failure to provide an adequate social historical anal-
ysis of the Soviet Union leave Marxist history vulnerable to the charge
that Marxism is dead after the events of 1989–91. Even Thompson, whose
moral denunciation of Stalinism was particularly vociferous, was guilty of this.
Designating the Soviet Union to be a ‘parasitism’ was hardly a robust expla-
nation. Some have traced residual distortions in such Marxist historians. For
26 M. PERRY
instance, they linked history from below and the popular front strategy of the
Communist International (1935–9) or Stalinist determinism and Althusserian
structuralism.59
The omission of Stalinism from Marxism is not to deny that there are
disagreements within Marxism and that Marxism itself does not evolve. (Or
even that there are historians who uneasily combine elements of the two.)
Marxism’s theoretical and empirical frontier, like that of science, advances over
a broad horizon. It does not furnish absolute truth but it approximates reality;
it is provisional (see Chapter 7).
It is possible to maintain that the classical Marxist tradition contains both
historical writing and the philosophy of history that allow a convincing alter-
native to current historical fashions. Marx and his followers said plenty about
the chief historiographical questions of today: time, space, culture, language,
idealism, total history, the mind, power, emotions, and class. That is why
Marxism has been one of the most influential bodies of theory in historical
investigation. What is more, Marxism can mount telling critiques of empiri-
cism, postmodernism, and neo-Weberanism. History itself is under attack. As
Richard Evans observed in In Defence of History (1997).
Such has been the power and influence of the post-modernist critique of history
that growing numbers of historians themselves are abandoning the search for
truth, the belief in objectivity, and the quest for a scientific approach to the past.
No wonder so many historians are worried about the future of their discipline.60
How have Marxist historians coped with the experience of Stalinism? Firstly,
some historians formally accepted Stalinism but were able to write Marxist
history despite this. The ability to do so depended on circumstances and the
areas of study. The British Communist Party historians in the 1940s and 1950s
fell within this category because of factors discussed later. Gramsci never broke
from Stalin but because of his imprisonment worked beyond Stalin’s influence.
However, there were subjects where Stalinism and writing Marxist history
were evidently incompatible: the Russian Revolution and the Hitler–Stalin
Pact being cases in point. Secondly, some Marxist historians explicitly reject
Stalinism but have not developed a rigorous explanation of this phenomenon.
Many historians associated with history from below could be included in this
camp. Thompson could say,
I was, of course, very active in the Communist Party and remained so until
1956. This didn’t mean that one didn’t have many inner doubts and also wasn’t
guilty of many casuistries explaining away what one should have repudiated
in the character of Stalinism. But also I am not prepared to accept a Trot-
skyist interpretation of a whole past that dismisses an entire phase of historical
development and all the multiform popular initiatives and authentic areas of
self-activity and heroism as “Stalinist”. The popular dimensions of Communist
activity, then and in many cases still today, are such as to prevent this kind of
intellectualisation.61
Here Thompson conflated his sympathy with the communist rank and file
(one shared by many of the very Trotskyists he disputes) and the need for a
root-and-branch break with the intellectual and political tradition of Stalinism
and the communist parties. David Montgomery, the American Marxist labour
historian who like Thompson had been a Communist Party member, had a
similar ambivalence. On the positive side of the scales, the American Commu-
nist Party put its members in touch with the real struggles of black and white
working-class America and, in the day-to-day, members tried to make sense of
things through some form of Marxism.
The negative side is also important. The real flowering of creative work among
the people you are thinking of came after they had left the Party. The offi-
cial intellectual life of the Party … was stifling. In spite of the familiar slogan
“Marxism is a guide to action, not a dogma,” theory appeared at that level of
the movement in the form of explanations of official texts or even ex post facto
justifications of actions taken, and not as a rigorous method of analysing and
changing social realities. In this sense, both the roots and the breaking away
were very important.62
Thirdly, there are those Marxists who have rejected Stalinism and formulated
a systematic explanation of the character of the Soviet Union. Leon Trotsky
would be an obvious candidate for this category. The significance of this
typology is that it explains the complex relationship between Stalinism and
Marxism in historical writing. But more than this, it also helps to account
for how the collapse of Berlin Wall affected Marxist historians and the ability
of Marxist history to renew itself. To speed renewal Marxist historians exist
whose work provides a historical materialist explanation of Stalinism. Hobs-
bawm may dismiss such issues in his Age of Extremes (1994) as forgotten and
irrelevant arguments but if there is to be a new Marxist generation of histo-
rians this question is paramount. What Hobsbawm finds unpalatable is that
those who provide the clearest analysis come from the Trotskyist camp long
time reviled by the communist parties across the world as Hitler’s agents. In
this tradition, Moshe Lewin’s Lenin’s Last Struggle (1968) charted Lenin’s
growing opposition to Stalin, which was hampered by a fatal combination of
assassination attempts and strokes. Isaac Deutscher’s biographies of Stalin and
Trotsky demonstrate how their struggle was more than a clash of personali-
ties but political principle and far-reaching socio-economic forces. There is not
the time to do more than sketch: the isolation of the revolution, the defeated
revolutions of Europe, the destruction of the Russian working class through
war, civil war, and famine, and the counterweight of the rising ruling bureau-
cracy all contributed to this process. Ironically those who equate Stalinism and
Marxism employ a teleological logic akin to Orwell’s account of Animal Farm.
If totalitarianism was inscribed in Lenin’s What is to be Done? (1902), then the
need to search for an explanation in the twist and turn of the actual histor-
ical events is redundant. The most extreme version of this teleology appeared
28 M. PERRY
in Talmon’s Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1966) in which the Enlight-

enment and Rousseau are blamed via the Jacobin regime for the terror and
dictatorship in Russia.
As well as historical materialist accounts of Stalinism’s rise, there has also
been class analyses of the Soviet Union which justify jettisoning Stalinism from
Marxism proper. Amongst these Leon Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed (1937)
and Tony Cliff’s Russia: a Marxist Analysis (1947) stand out.63 For a class
analysis of Eastern Europe from different non-Stalinist perspectives one might
consult Rudolph Bahro and Milovan Djilas.64 Chris Harman’s Class Strug-
gles in Eastern Europe (1988) applied history from below to the revolts of
workers, students, and peasants in Eastern Europe against their rulers: East
Germany 1953, Hungary and Poland 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Poland
1980–1. For these Marxists, such revolutionary episodes more than any Cold
War propaganda exposed the humbug and brutality of the Eastern European
ruling classes. On the revolutions of 1989, Alex Callinicos’s Revenge of History
(1991) provided a perceptive analysis in line with the state capitalist view of
the Soviet Union and its satellites.
Conclusion
Despite the impact of Marxist historians now being somewhat dissipated, their
body of work is considerable and still influential upon wider ranks of historians.
Their endeavours raise two questions. First, what were the insights of Marx
that so animated these authors? Second, why has the project of Marxist history
experienced lean years of late? These questions underscore this text.
That Marxism encompasses such a breadth of historical subjects and
approaches is no accident. Old and new approaches, long- and short-
run history, theory, and empirical research all feature in Marxist histo-
ry’s panoramic perspectives. Marx understanding history as embracing its
entirety and its opposing poles. His dialectical method (see this chapter and
Chapter 7) proposes the connectedness of opposites acting together in a
greater whole. Despite Marxist historical writing’s diversity, it is clear from
Stalinism that Marxism is not an open label. The incompatibility of Stalinism
and Marxist history reveals that core principles and methods imply a negative
definition: what Marxism is not. Conversely, the following two chapters on
Marx and Engels establish what underpins the classical Marxist tradition.
CHAPTER 3
Marx and Engels’s Conception of History
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. Equally,
it addresses the key technical terms that Karl Marx (1818–83) and his long-
time collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–95) themselves employed.
Marx’s view of history, historical (or dialectical) materialism as he termed
it, consists of overarching concepts requiring consideration. These include the
forces and relations of production, materialism, class struggle, base and
superstructure, and the dialectic. Marx probed the past’s big questions: what
features does human history share across time? Is history scientific? How does
change come about? His concepts helped in this audacious research project.
To understand Marx’s intellectual ambition it is worth examining his historical
background.
History and the Enlightenment

Karl Marx personified the radical aftermath of the European Enlightenment
and the French Revolution. His views emerged from a critical engagement
with three major streams of thought that had the Enlightenment as their
source: French utopian socialism, British political economy, and German
philosophy. Young Marx encountered historical works and philosophies of
history that the Enlightenment also provided.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69511-8_3
30 M. PERRY
During the eighteenth century the horizons of historical investigation

began to lift from the narratives of battles, royal houses and the church to
more fundamental questions such as why civilisations flourished and eventu-
ally collapsed. Even though they were quite different, these works shared a
desire to understand civilisations from the perspective of their social dynamics
in much the same way that Newton (1642–1727), Galileo (1564–1642), and
Copernicus (1473–1543) before them had sought to reveal the laws of motion
of the universe. The Enlightenment bequeathed historical masterpieces such
as Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725–44) and Edward Gibbon’s (1737–
94) The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88).1
Vico believed that the history of all gentile peoples passed through common
developmental phases (in which culture was ‘poetic’ or ‘theological’, then
‘heroic’ and finally ‘human’).2 History for Enlightenment thinkers was cyclical
because, whilst it witnessed the gradual growth of reason at the expense of
the imagination, ultimately the moral corruption of the rational human age
brought decline and returned a people to their initial state. Gibbon, on the
other hand, sought to explain the collapse of the Roman Empire through
the corroding influence of Christianity on the imperial state. Interweaving
narrative and explanation, Gibbon’s epochal timeframe and his scrutiny of
the underlying processes mark out his work as a historiographical classic. In
Gibbon and Vico, we can see where Marx might have gained his desire to
explain change over time.
The Enlightenment also discussed the encounter between Europeans and
non-Europeans in the ‘exotic’ reaches of the globe. This ‘age of reason’
embodied a contradiction between on one hand its universal ideas of human
rights, freedom, and justice and on the other the rise of racial thought with
its assumptions of European superiority alongside European involvement in
black slavery in the new world. Some Enlightenment thinkers celebrated the
‘state of nature’ of the first men and women: the ‘noble savages’ in simple
societies living according to nature’s laws, using natural rights as the basis of
an argument for universal freedoms and citizenship, even communism (in the
case of Gracchus Babeuf [1760–97]). Others, such as Adam Ferguson (1723–
1816) and Georg F.W. Hegel (1770–1831), stressing their ‘backwardness’
viewed these societies as the dawn of human history. Articulating an archetypal
Eurocentric view, for them, European society, having passed through inter-
mediary stages, was its setting sun. Hegel’s conception of ‘World Historical
Peoples’, whilst sharing Vico’s cyclical view, ascribed no great importance
to African civilisations. Ferguson believed that different races belonged to
different historical epochs: hunting, pastoralism, agriculture, and commerce.
Here was an attempt to chart human history through different stages in the
process of production, like Marx though in his case without the racial assump-
tions. Equally, Adam Smith (1723–90), the Scottish political economist and
author of The Wealth of Nations (1776), adopted the same stages of society
and argued that the mode of subsistence shaped the character of warfare and
justice.3
3 MARX AND ENGELS’S CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 31
Hegel, the German idealist philosopher, was particularly influential on the

young Marx. Indeed, having adapted it from Hegel, the dialectic became the
cornerstone of Marx’s method. Hegel and then Marx utilised the dialectic to
describe and explain the complex processes of human history. This method
rests on the following premises:
1. All things are in themselves contradictory (See the unity of opposites in

glossary).
2. Contradiction is at the heart of all change.
3. If we concentrate on individual things we can only see the differences
between them not the relationships between them.
4. The world can only be understood by seeing things as processes. Changes
in quantity lead to changes in quality.
5. Things only acquire meaning when understood as instants in a process
of change (See the negation of the negation, and mediation in the
glossary).
6. Things must be understood as part of a wider whole, a totality.
The failure to appreciate the centrality of the dialectic has led many to lapse
into deterministic or crude versions of Marxism. Whereas for Hegel history
developed through the ideas and the mind, through the increasing human
consciousness of our world and ourselves, Marx preferred to view human
history as developing in relation to the material world. He ‘turned Hegel
on his head’ and, having appropriated the dialectic, rejected idealism for a
materialist conception of history.
Finally, the social historians of the French Revolution profoundly influenced
Marx in his reading of history. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the
French social historians interpreted the events of 1789–1815 as class conflict,
as the rise of the bourgeoisie and its antagonism with the old regime domi-
nated by the feudal aristocracy.4 Marx inherited much from the Enlightenment
but his view of history was both distinctive and more elaborate. Like Enlight-
enment thought, Marx pondered the connection between history and science.
He sought the human past’s underpinning laws or variables that might explain
history’s great riddles.
Can Human History Be Scientific?

Both Marx and Engels believed that their socialism rested on scientific not
utopian foundations. Engels credited Marx with discoveries akin to Charles
Darwin’s (1809–82) in the field of evolution. Whilst Marx and Engels believed
that their conception of historical change (historical materialism) was scien-
tific, whether or not the study of history or society can be scientific has
long been a subject for debate. Most recently, postmodernists have main-
tained that science and the whole rationalist tradition is a grand narrative,
32 M. PERRY
a fictional account of the long run of human history, and should treated with
‘incredulity’.5 Or, worse still, science itself is the enemy of human freedom as
an oppressive strait-jacket of ‘power-knowledge’.
Marx often employed the language of the natural sciences to underline the
scientific character of his work. He spoke of the laws of historical development
just as Newton wrote of the laws of motion of the universe. This rhetoric has
led many to accuse Marxism of determinism (formulating immutable laws
that deny free will and openness in history). At the same time, both Marx
and Engels were well aware that natural and human histories were not simple
equivalents. Though the dialectic operates in both, in human history it is not
blind as it is composed of conscious human beings capable of choice.6 As a
result, the level of determination is lower in human history and the sharpness
of alternatives is more acute: there are more either/or dilemmas, such as the
tussle between revolution and counter-revolution.
Marx hailed the progress of modern science but was also one of its sharpest
critics. He noted that it brought spectacular progress in human wealth but
condemned the majority to poverty; it raised the potential of human produc-
tion but diverted vast resources into the weapons of destruction; it promised
human liberation from drudgery but robbed nature of its riches and enslaved
millions in underpaid and exhausting toil, (in subscribing to this final point,
Marx and Engels would formulate a critique of their own age, not least the
British ‘Industrial Revolution’7 ). Marx and Engels’s claim to have developed
a scientific socialism relied on: empirical observation and research, scien-
tific scepticism, and dialectical materialism. Marx believed that scientific
revelation was progressive with discoveries widening the frontier of human
understanding. Therefore in every epoch there were boundaries to scien-
tific knowledge that would be bypassed in the future. Engels argued that
Marx made two such discoveries: the illusory fairness of exploitation under
capitalism (the wage contract was apparently made between equals) and the
materialist conception of history.
The limits of scientific knowledge result from the fact that direct obser-
vation—empiricism—alone was incapable of explaining natural phenomena.
The explanatory limits of observation also provide the material basis for reli-
gion, mysticism, and animism; the task of the scientist is to prise open the
inner secrets of matter. Marx’s science stands or falls on his assertion to have
uncovered the inner workings of human history. According to this proposition,
the development of human society is not inexplicable (i.e. either random or
mystical) but within our grasp if viewed from the correct scientific standpoint.
In the same way that new branches of sciences had unlocked the mysteries of,
for example, the earthquake so historical materialism explained the character
of human society.
Marx firmly believed that the study of history could be scientific, and he
constantly endeavoured to base his ideas on the most up-to-date thinking.
His voluminous notebooks that are currently being published attest to this,
revealing the profoundly ecological aspect of Marx’s thought. Allied to
this was Marx’s prodigious empirical investigation in whatever field he was

studying. He was also keenly aware of the need for critical approach to
new work and acknowledged that demonstrable proof was the necessary
companion of scientific advance (one of his favourite mottoes was ‘doubt
everything’). Similarly, Engels upbraided ‘so-called Marxists’ who toyed with
theory as a way of avoiding serious historical research.8 For Marx, the dialectic
suggested that theory and evidence, though opposites, must be intimately
connected. Despite the current fashion for denying the scientific character of
history, it does have accepted procedures of verification or falsification and
methods allowing us to point to the firmest conclusions reasonable.
More fundamentally, Marx’s philosophy was the culmination of the long
struggle of science against religion and magic, which had itself provided the
epistemological basis for a scientific study of society. Theology had previ-
ously overshadowed science in the universities and monasteries as well as being
heavily censored by the Church. Scientific knowledge remained as Engels
put it the ‘humble handmaiden’ of the Catholic Church.9 For science to
emerge in its own right, a battle of ideas took place which closely reflected the
fortunes of the battles against the old feudal order. Scholarship and learning
gradually escaped the confines of the monastery as the reformation and bour-
geois revolutions created the space for scientific inquiry beyond the control of
Rome. Protestantism with its rejection of the miracles and magic of Catholi-
cism took the first step towards the seventeenth-century materialism of Sir
Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). This mate-
rialism reflected the desire to explain matter without recourse to religion or
mysticism and therefore went hand in hand with the great discoveries of the
age in Newtonian physics, anatomy, and chemistry. Yet this materialism was a
limited, static, intellectual system: science and materialism were not concerned
with the historical process of the universe, the unitary and the evolving char-
acter of matter. With Darwin’s discovery of evolution, Engels declared ‘Nature
is the proof of the dialectic’. He and Marx lived in an age when science
and philosophy recognised the historical or evolutionary character of life and
the universe. Dialectical materialism is therefore not a method in the sense
of a laboratory procedure or a statistical correlation, though it does provide
insights into these, it is a scientific paradigm (and it has been adopted by a
small number of present-day working scientists).10
Perhaps the most persuasive support for Marx’s argument that his view of
history is scientific is the predictive quality of his laws of capitalist develop-
ment outlined in Capital (1867). Many natural sciences have, as a defining
characteristic, a predictive quality for their laws. The chemist knows the reac-
tion that will occur if he adds an acid and an alkali long before he mixes them.
However, critics of Marx place too much emphasis on his supposed role as
prophet. Marx himself acknowledged the limits of second-guessing the future
and some of his forecasts were indeed off the mark. He was particularly prone
to telescoping economic crises and underestimating the powers of the recovery
34 M. PERRY
of the capitalist system. However, Marx outlined many of features of the capi-
talist world that are familiar to us today (the generalisation of wage-labour,
the concentration of capital, its internationalisation, the boom-slump cycle,
etc.). His insights into industrial capitalism made at a time when the fledgling
factory system affected little more than Lancashire, parts of Belgium, and small
pockets of the Franco-German borders are quite remarkable.
The Distinctiveness of Human Labour

Marx and Engels reacted enthusiastically to Darwin’s theory of evolution and
sought to apply it to humanity. According to Engels’s pamphlet The Part
Played by Labour in the Transition of Ape to Man (1876), conscious labour,
the unique physiology of the hand, and tool-making provided the impetus for
the development of the human species.
Hundreds of thousands of years ... certainly elapsed before human society arouse
out of a troupe of tree-climbing monkeys. Yet it did finally emerge. And what
do we find once more as the characteristic difference between the troupe of
monkeys and human society? Labour.11
As our human ancestors descended from the trees, they underwent a series of
metamorphoses: their front legs became free so that the hand became more
dextrous; they stood increasingly upright; they became omnivores, and, as a
result of increasing protein intake, their brains expanded; their vocal cords
developed; and they ultimately acquired speech. These physiological devel-
opments were necessary for the course that human history was eventually to
take.
Even before Engels’s adaptation of Darwinian theory, he and Marx had
privileged labour and production as the distinguishing characteristic of human
nature. The role of labour constituted their grounds for the refutation of
idealism. Labour, for Marx and Engels, is what makes us human, because
material needs, not human thought, are the mainsprings of our development,
with consciousness itself a necessary condition of human production. Marx
and Engels, however, rejected the crude materialism of Feuerbach (1804–72).
For Marx and Engels, the mind does not passively reflect the material world,
through labour we change the world around us. During this process mind
and matter interact transforming subjective plans into objective artefacts. The
comparison of human labour and the animal kingdom illustrates this distinc-
tion. Even the most elaborate works of an animal species, the spider’s web or
the caterpillar’s cocoon are made instinctively; they are uniform attributes of
those species and of their paths of evolution. Unlike other animals, humans,
whether building a shelter or weaving cloth, are able to conjure pictures in
their minds, to design, to innovate, to anticipate nature—in short, consciously
to produce. Because of labour, human society is dynamic whereas other species
adapt slowly and blindly to changing circumstances.
It is hard to explain the success, or even the survival, of the human species
without an appreciation of the contribution made by labour. Gordon V.
Childe, the Marxist archaeologist, pointed out that on the face of it humans
have a multiplicity of evolutionary disadvantages: we are naked and cannot
naturally survive in cold climates; we are not equipped with the fangs or claws
of a predator; we cannot graze as we have only one stomach; and because of
the size of the mature human brain, we are exceptionally vulnerable during
our long infancies. The pattern of human evolution and our achievements as
a species are only explicable by the distinctive quality of human production.12
Once Marx and Engels had established the primacy of production to human
nature they began to detail its historical characteristics: they initially made the
distinction between the forces and relations of production.
The Forces of Production

The forces of production are an aggregate of the knowledge, tools, and
(natural and human) resources of production in any given society.13 These
forces enable production to take place and indeed to expand. They encompass
various aspects of life: the development of technology or skills and the ability
to harness nature for productive ends. Generally, the productive forces develop
cumulatively and progressively because the satisfaction of human needs gives
rise to new needs. History’s most common example of expanded requirements
placed on production is the growth in the number of mouths to feed.
The advances in technology, in skills, in travel, in modes of language and
thought—in sum, the gathering forces of human production—are quite aston-
ishing. One good indicator of the amazing expansion in the productive forces
over the long run of human existence is population growth.
Those living in Victorian Britain, Marx included, marvelled at the feats of
engineering that dwarfed the most spectacular achievements of antiquity and
the Middle Ages. Steam power signalled the age of the railway, the steamship,
and the factory, which within a century had conquered the entire globe.
Human history entails an unending struggle with the natural environment.
Floods, tempests, droughts, predators, and poisonous vegetation reveal our
frailty, but we have also transformed these potentially destructive forces of
nature into forces of human production. Each new manipulation of nature
has advanced the forces of production, the ability of human beings to satisfy
their material needs. Consider fire. Capable of destroying the sources of food,
shelter and human life itself, the fire gods in ancient religions were suitably
threatening, dangerous and capricious. But by trial and error, imitation, and
eventually conscious design, fire has been transformed from a threat to a
survival technique enhancing the lives of humanity: fire rendered indigestible
foodstuffs edible, it facilitated some of the earliest forms of agriculture through
the slash-and-burn techniques, it allowed humans to inhabit cold and dark
climates, and it ultimately enabled the early technological advances of indus-
trial capitalism through the burning of fossil fuels. The progressive harnessing
36 M. PERRY
of nature massively expanded the productive forces at human disposal. Over

time human societies became less at the mercy of nature and more able to
transform our environment: damming or diverting rivers, irrigating barren
lands, constructing sailboats, waterwheels and windmills, erecting buildings
from mud, rock, slate, or brick.
These changes affect human social behaviour. The growth of the productive
forces might bring about a fall in the death rate, an increase in leisure time,
or a greater division of labour altering the character of society. As the forces
of production mount up, human societies are transformed, or as Marx put
it, the relations of production are altered: a village may become a city and
dense forest may become agricultural land. This all results in an evolution in
the social relations between people.
Social Relations of Production

In the process of production, humans interact with each other and with
nature. Marx termed these interactions the relations of production. The rela-
tions of production vary from one society and stage of historical development
to another. Within specific social relations of production, gold and silver
become money; tidal currents become trade routes; black people are racialised
and enslaved; and, land becomes nomadic territory, a royal domain, a village
commons or privately owned wheat fields.
The interactions between humans are social relations of production. But
unlike the beehive with its complex yet static division of labour, human society
has the capacity to evolve rapidly. These relations may develop into class
relations, though most of human history consisted of small egalitarian hunter-
gatherer bands with rudimentary technology, few possessions, and often a
nomadic existence. In the last 10,000 years, various class societies based on
larger social groups, social inequality, enhanced technology, and economic
advances have emerged. Over time, the division of labour increasingly sepa-
rated mental and material production allowing the creation of surplus produce,
private property, and groups that are to live off the labours of others, through
religious consent and physical coercion. In each class society, the social rela-
tions of production entail exploitation whereby the ruling class have special
functions, authority, and privileges and live from the fruits of the labours of
the majority.
This pattern of class relations varies across history. It may be the ancient
Roman master and slave, the feudal lord and the serf, the guild master and
the journeyman in the workshops of medieval Europe, or a plantation owner
and an African slave, a capitalist and the wage-labourer in a Manchester cotton
factory. These relationships of exploitation give rise to class conflict and
provide one of the principal driving forces of human history, an ‘uninterrupted
now hidden, now open, fight’, as Marx famously put it in the Communist
Manifesto.14 Alongside the rise of class society and the instrument of the
state to protect the property and power of rulers, Engels argued, emerged
the oppression of women subordinated to the supply of male heirs and the
tasks of reproduction.
Taken as a whole, a society is constituted by its social relations of produc-
tion. Human societies are shaped by their relationship to natural resources
(plants and animals, climate and terrain); this relationship implies specific,
though evolving, social relations that may over time enter into crisis. Where
once settled agriculture first flourished in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle
East, now the arid desert is found. The combination of the exhaustion of
natural resources, deforestation, soil erosion, and climatic change has denuded
human history’s Garden of Eden. These clashes between the forces and rela-
tions of production hold the clue to the collapse of great civilisations and the
seemingly inexplicable timing of revolutionary crises.
Compare this account with the pioneering and still influential demographer
the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) who wrote an enor-
mously influential treatise, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).15
Malthus argued for the abolition of the Poor Laws and against English
supporters of the French Revolution. He maintained that population tended
to grow more rapidly than food production and that population would precip-
itate a crisis point of catastrophic famines and epidemics (or the ‘positive
check’ on population). Both Marx and Malthus explained the evident cycle
of development and crisis in materialist terms. They differed in that Malthus
treated population and agriculture as two isolated ahistorical variables whilst
Marx understood the transition to new modes of production and their revo-
lutionary changes in productivity. Malthus, unlike Marx, did not account
for the improvements in technology and agricultural efficiency that enable
modern societies increasingly to avoid the famines that he foresaw. The intel-
lectual contest between Malthus and Marx remains significant to this day in
relation to environmentalism (has overpopulation or capitalism created the
anthropocene?) and welfare policy (does welfare create a dependent poor or is
unemployment an inherent feature of capitalism?).
The Clash Between the Forces

and the Relations of Production
The combination of the forces and relations of production holds the key
to Marx’s explanation of great epochal transformations of civilisations: either
catastrophic decline or progressive surges forward. As the forces of produc-
tion develop, changes occur in the relations of production—in the division of
labour and in human environments. Just as the use of iron tips on spears could
make killing big game easier and safer and therefore alter hunting patterns,
or irrigation could increase the numbers of mouths fed by a given piece of
land, so today medical advances and contraception have transformed sexual
mores. New social relations of production can enable the acceleration of the
productive forces. During certain periods however the existing social relations
of production can act as a barrier to the advance of the productive forces.
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esfuerzo especialísimo que hizo en obsequio á una persona tan
digna como el recomendante) de que si el mozo no se libra, se le
devolverá el dinero.
¿Qué más celo, qué mayor desinterés puede exigirse á aquel
protector?
Así pensando, afloja las dos peluconas el desdichado; y con la
promesa de no hablar del asunto ni á su propia sombra, porque de
descubrirse el ajo tanto sufriría el seductor como los seducidos,
vuélvese Juan á su lugar lleno de risueñas esperanzas.
La misma escena se representa días después en casa del agente,
cuando el secretario le presenta á Pedro para que haga algo por él
en las pocas horas que faltan hasta la de la declaración de
soldados.
Cuando ésta llega, Juan y Pedro admiran al protector, que no cesa
de moverse del salón de sesiones á los pasillos, de los pasillos á las
oficinas y de las oficinas al cuarto de los médicos. Es verdad que
también notan que todos sus trabajos se reducen á dar una
sombrerada á unos, á mirar intencionadamente á otros, á salir
detrás de aquél y á entrar en pos de éste; pero como lo principal
está hecho de víspera y en secreto, basta su presencia allí como
recuerdo de lo convenido.
El Consejo, entre tanto, declara soldado á Juan.
Bien sabía el secretario que uno de los dos tenía que serlo
irremisiblemente.
El activo protector, en cumplimiento de su palabra, devuelve, pocas
horas después, las dos onzas de oro á la persona que representa á
Juan.
—No se ha podido hacer más,—dice al entregar las monedas.
Y el que las recibe, al ver tanta honradez, tantos afanes malogrados
¿qué menos ha de hacer que obsequiar con unos cuantos duros á
aquel caballero?
Despachado así Juan, le dice á Pedro:
—Amigo mío: la cosa ha estado en un tris; llegué á temer que
aquellos señores no se conformaran con las dos onzas y se me
volvieran atrás: así me lo anunciaron; pero les apreté de firme, y al
cabo se conformaron. El presidente, sobre todo, estaba emperrado
como un demonio en los sesenta duros. Conque te doy la
enhorabuena.
Y Pedro, ó su padre, conmovido ante tanta adhesión, estrecha la
mano de aquel señor generoso, y desliza en ella, por no ofenderle
con la oferta, media onceja más, que el otro recibe muy ruboroso y
porque no se tome á desaire.
De este modo, aun sin la propina, que es eventual, son infalibles las
dos onzas, puesto que uno de los dos mozos tenía que ser soldado.
No necesito decir que éstas y otras ganancias análogas se parten
religiosamente entre el secretario que prepara los negocios, y su
asociado que los remata.
—¿Y es posible—preguntará el lector menos perspicaz,—que nada
sospechen esos pobres hombres?
Así debe de ser, puesto que el único convencimiento seguro que
llevan, de vuelta á su casa, es que los señores que componen el
Consejo ó la Diputación, todos, sin excepción de uno solo, se
venden por un puñado de dinero.
Otra vez se trata de un mozo notoriamente inútil por defecto físico,
cuyo padre tiene en dinero ó en especie algo que explotar. Aunque
declarado libre y sin protesta en el ayuntamiento, el secretario le
advierte que en la capital le van á dar un disgusto si no se agarra
bien. El mozo tiembla, y su padre se resigna á hacer un sacrificio.
Una carta para cierto médico célebre, que todo lo arregla en la
ciudad, y la promesa de que con menos de quinientos reales
quedará el pobre hombre libre de todo recelo, le hacen encaminarse
con su hijo en busca de aquella providencia, después de haber
malvendido una vaca ó hipotecado el huerto, para llenarse de duros
el bolsillo. El médico no es otro que el agente consabido. Enterado
de la carta de su socio, manda desnudarse al mozo, que tiene una
joroba enorme y una pierna más corta que la otra; le palpa, le soba,
le exprime, le estira y le sacude, y acaba por decirle que aquello
está grave y que, si no anda listo, le van á declarar útil. Felizmente
influye él en el Consejo y sobre los facultativos, y puede arreglarlo
todo si el interesado hace un sacrificio para tapar la boca á aquella
gente hambrienta. Se calcula en veinte duros el esfuerzo, los afloja
la víctima; y con la promesa del filántropo médico de que si el chico
no se libra se compromete él á ponerle sustituto á sus expensas,
vuélvense á su casa padre é hijo, maldiciendo de las leyes del reino
y de la conciencia de sus intérpretes jurados, porque sin hombres
entendidos como el secretario, y benéficos como el médico
influyente, ni los pobres jorobados estarían seguros en su pueblo.
Lo mismo discurre otro infeliz que, merced á un procedimiento
análogo, ha conseguido que sólo le cueste doscientos reales el
testimonio de un expediente de quintas archivado en la Diputación,
de donde no podía sacarse, según dictamen del secretario, en
menos de quince duros, sin la influencia de un amigo suyo que todo
lo arregla en la ciudad. Como el señorón sólo hace aquellas cosas
por servir á los amigos, el buen hombre le ha dado además tres
pesetas para el portero, que, por lo visto, se ocupó en esas
pequeñeces oficinescas, á la sombra de la influencia poderosa de
aquél; y cree que se ha ahorrado cinco duros, sin sospechar que le
han robado diez y medio.
Y no quiero citar más ejemplos de este género de infamias, por lo
mismo que es inagotable el catálogo.
Con la idea que se tiene en los pueblos del saber, de la travesura y
de la omnipotencia de un secretario, nada más fácil sería para éste,
si le diera por honrado como le da por bribón, que conseguir la
concordia completa entre las más enconadas rencillas de sus
convecinos. Lejos de esto, las irrita, y procura que se lleven todas á
la justicia, para explotarlas á su gusto; y donde no las hay, las
enciende con el mismo fin.
Un día se ve citado un pobre hombre ante la autoridad.
—Se te acusa—dice el secretario mientras el juez eructa
despatarrado en su banco,—en parte que pasa el montanero, de
haber traído tu hija una carga de quimas.
—¡Eran ramas secas, señor!
—¡Quimas dice la autoridad!... Ésta sabe también que la susodicha
hija tuya saltó la huerta de Juan Bardales, al venir del monte; robó
las manzanas y rompió el seto. Ítem, que apedreó las gallinas del
mismo vecino en su propio corral. Ítem, que enturbió la fuente
pública un poco después, y le rompió el silabario á una niña del
mismo sujeto, que iba de la escuela y se encontró con ella.
—Señor, la muchacha dice que no cogió una mala manzana; que el
seto que se cayó, al entrar ella, volvió á levantarle; que al ver que la
acometía el perro, le tiró con una piedra que fué á parar al corral y
espantó las gallinas; que por sacar un pendiente que se le cayó en
la fuente bebiendo en ella, enturbió el agua, y que si rompió la
cartilla á la hija de ese sujeto, fué porque la muchacha la tiró del
moño.
—Pamema y todo pamema. Pruebas cantan, y aquí están contra ti.
Con la menor de ellas se te puede echar á presidio, porque este
montón de papeles, que son leyes y decretos, se te va encima. Todo
te condena: la Ley de aprovechamiento de aguas, por lo de la
fuente; la de orden público, por lo de las pedradas tumultuosas á las
gallinas en propio corral ajeno, y el Código penal, título tantos,
artículos tales ó cuales, por lo de la huerta, supuesto que ha habido
robo con fractura, y fractura también en lo de la cartilla. ¿Y qué fué
lo de las quimas más que un robo á mano armada y en despoblado?
¿No fué en el monte? ¿No llevaba tu hija un machete? ¿Pues sabes
tú lo que rezan las leyes en tales casos?... ¡Hasta la horca, si á
mano viene! Pero la justicia no es rencorosa... y todo puede
arreglarse. ¿Quieres transigir antes de que se escriba el juicio y
haya que enviarle al juzgado de primera instancia para que se forme
causa criminal?
El pobre hombre tiembla y cree, ante tanto papelón oficial como se
le enseña, y, sobre todo, ante la idea que tiene de que, si no merece
su delito tanta pena, puede la habilidad del secretario conseguir que
se la apliquen.
—Transijo—dice,—aunque casi ignora por qué se le persigue.
Se tasa en seis duros la multa por la leña y los desperfectos de la
fuente; págalos el paciente, así como los derechos del juicio,
aunque no se ha celebrado, y paga también la convidada en la
taberna, de la cual sale á media noche y á medios pelos,
admirándose de que el secretario no le haya pedido también las
asaduras, pues, lo mismo que las multas, se las hubiera dado sin
replicar.
En algunas ocasiones estos infelices se arman de valor, y hasta se
atreven á consultar sus cuitas con alguna persona más ilustrada y
pudiente que ellos. Entonces oyen un consejo sano, que de algo les
valdría si le pusieran en práctica; pero antes de volver á su casa, ya
les pesa como un remordimiento porque temen las iras del déspota
si lo descubre, y no descansan hasta dar con él y hacerle beber en
su mismo vaso.
Porque se han dado casos, muy pocos en verdad, de apelar, en un
juicio de faltas, para ante el juez de primera instancia, y ¡qué cola ha
traído el atrevimiento! Por lo pronto, una sola vez se ha revocado la
sentencia del secretario, porque aquel señor que le guarda las
espaldas, puede hasta torcer la vara de la justicia. Para eso es
influyente en elecciones; y como el secretario le sirve á él en iguales
lances, tiene él que servir al secretario á toda costa. La vez que se
revocó la sentencia, aunque era inicua, le costó al juez el destino.
¡Conque figúrense ustedes!
El hecho es que los perdidosos y el ganancioso sufrieron las
mismas consecuencias con respecto á los furores del tirano; porque
lo que éste castiga es el atrevimiento de alzarse contra él, no el
resultado de la apelación.
Al tenor del caso pintado más atrás, calcúlese cuántos puede urdir
el bribón para castigar á sus víctimas y sacarles los cuartos. Aun sin
estos motivos, no se conoce un ejemplar de que haya sentenciado
un juicio conforme á justicia: según el ojo con que mira á cada uno
de los litigantes, así sentencia.
Por eso la frase sacramental de los desdichados, al verse
perseguidos y robados, es ésta siempre:
—¿Y qué voy á hacer yo contra ese hombre? ¡Gracias que se ha
conformado con eso!
Y «esto» es, quizá, el haberse quedado el pobre sin pan y sin
camisa.
Cuando se muere alguien que deja cosa que valga la pena, y se
propone sacar una parte de ello, bien en concepto de manda
especial, ó de mejora en favor de tal cual pariente, con quien ya se
ha puesto de acuerdo, acude á la cabecera del moribundo, papel en
mano y pluma en ristre, «porque los abintestatos acaban con las
familias».
—Lego para misas por mi alma...—dice el que va á morir.
—¡Qué alma ni qué calabaza, hombre! Las buenas obras son las
que te han de salvar, no los pícaros curas.
—Es que San Gregorio...
—Los santos no comen.
—Es que Dios...
—Dios no se mete en estas pequeñeces...
Si el testador se convence, se estampa en el papel la voluntad del
secretario; y si no... también. Apuradamente aquél casi nunca sabe,
ó ya no puede, leer ni firmar. Hecho el documento, llama el
secretario á siete borregos que ya estaban avisados y reunidos en la
taberna inmediata; firman á ciegas, y se acaba la operación.
Muerto el testador, cobra el secretario seis duros por sus derechos y
el papel; y después que éste se formaliza ante escribano, llámase á
la parte y recibe la manda, ó lo ofrecido en la mejora que él supo
arrancar.
Si el secretario necesita madera, va al monte, señala los árboles
que le convienen, y dice al guarda:
—Túmbalos.
Á los pocos días se rematan en concejo tantos robles viejos que han
aparecido caídos en el suelo, según parte del guarda. Están en lo
más inaccesible del monte, y apenas valdrán para quemar. Con
estas noticias, nadie los puja. Un solo vecino ofrece cinco reales por
cada uno, y eso porque no son para él.
De este modo adquiere el secretario media docena de hermosas
vigas por treinta reales... Porque el acarreo se le hacen los vecinos
por una convidada de aguardiente.
Como tiene todas las voluntades en su mano, y éstas pueden
volverse contra el médico titular, contra el maestro ó contra el cura,
cuando á él se le antoje, al primero le ha impuesto la obligación de
darle dos mil reales de los diez que le paga el pueblo; al segundo,
parte del maíz que recauda, ó el equivalente en dinero; y al último,
como nada le puede chupar, le tiene prevenido que á la menor
alusión que oiga en sus sermones, á su mozona, á sus manejos ó á
cosa que le pertenezca, le forma un expediente de conspirador que
le balda.
Cuanto se mueve, cuanto respira, cuanto vive en el pueblo, está
sujeto, amarrado, á la voluntad del tirano. Todas las épocas, todos
los acontecimientos le sirven para sus fines y le producen dinero; y
este dinero es el sudor, la agonía de unos cuantos pobres labriegos,
que, sin una cruz como aquélla, quizá fueran felices... hasta donde
se puede serlo en este pícaro mundo.
Por eso todos le maldicen, todos le execran; todos, pero muy bajito,
le piden á Dios que se le quite de en medio, como la mayor de las
calamidades; mas como todos le temen, todos, entre tanto, marchan
sumisos á su voz, como rebaño de esclavos delante del sangriento
azote; todos tiemblan en su presencia, y todos le dan de buena
gana la camisa, considerando que pudo haberles robado hasta el
pellejo...
Y ahora caigo en que, entretenido en pintar á este tipo por el lado de
sus hechos, no le he dado á conocer por el de su estilo.
Sirva, pues, de muestra el siguiente párrafo tomado de un informe
suyo acerca de unos terrenos comunales que trató de apropiarse, so
pretexto de que había en ellos una charca, la cual se comprometía á
cegar si se la cedían á este precio... con el terreno en que radicaba:
«Asimismo, el vecindario colindante á cuatro vientos acaece de
continuo de terciana pestífera y otras insalaciones, porque, según
dictamen facultativo, las aguas contingentes en un solo punto,
arrojan de sí corrompiciones y putrimentos que insurreccionan toda
robustez por opípara que sea. Y tocante á esta laguna, Excmo.
Señor, es de las más eminentes y perseverantes; como que ocupa
una extensión de diez carros de tierra, y no se ve seca de sus
líquidos ni en la fogosidad del verano, por lo cual abundan en ella
las ranas cuadrúpedas y los peces acuáticos de ambos sexos,
quiero decir, de varias dimensiones».
De manera, lector, que no puede darse un pillo más redomado, que
sea, al mismo tiempo, mayor pedazo de bruto.
IV
Ahora bien, señores gobiernos (y perdonen ustedes la franqueza):
son ustedes muy escrupulosos en averiguar á cada instante cómo
piensan en política este ayuntamiento y el de más allá; y si hay
informes de que no son adictos sin condiciones á los hombres de la
situación, se les sustituye ignominiosamente con otros que inspiren
á ustedes mayor confianza. ¡Como si estos pobres baldragas
supieran lo que son matices políticos, ni adhesiones, ni partidos!
¡Como si les interesara otra cosa que la lozanía de sus mieses y la
seguridad de sus ahorros!
Si se tomaran ustedes el mismo afán por preguntar á sus
delegados:—¿Qué tal por esos pueblos? ¿Se roba, se veja mucho á
los pobres campesinos? ¿Queda todavía algún mal secretario sin
grillete?
Y con esto, y con enviar á presidio á los ladrones oficiales que aún
quedasen rezagados en los ayuntamientos... y también á los
señorones que los encubren, amparan y protegen, los pueblos se
irían en tropel detrás del inverosímil gobierno que tal hiciera, le
defenderían hasta el heroísmo, y no despegarían sus labios sino
para bendecirle.
Pues á fe que si los gobiernos no toman de buena gana mi consejo,
no será por lo comprometido del trance, ni por lo costoso del
procedimiento, terribles fantasmas que, en estos tiempos de la
diplomacia, de los cabildeos, de las mutuas contemplaciones... y de
los empréstitos ventajosos, son la obligada disculpa para dejar de
hacer tantas cosas buenas como se van echando de menos en
España.
1876.
NOTAS:
[3] Para evitar susceptibilidades como las que sacaron de quicio
á los secretarios rurales de media España al aparecer este
esbozo en un Lunes de El Imparcial, quiero declarar aquí, por lo
mismo que nadie me lo exige, que no me he propuesto retratar á
la clase entera, ni tampoco á un individuo determinado de ella,
sino hacer, con los rasgos de muchos, una fisonomía que encaje
bien en la memoria del lector un tantico aficionado á la vida
campestre, y, á ser posible, en el corazón de los gobernantes del
Estado, para... «los efectos consiguientes». De manera que,
como dijo el fabulista,
Á todos y á ninguno
Mis advertencias tocan:
Quien haga aplicaciones
Con su pan se lo coma.
(N. de la ed. de 1881).
[4] Tercio de contribución próximo á vencer.

[5] Véase Simón Verde.
REMINISCENCIAS
Esto de comparar tiempos con tiempos, no es siempre una manía

propia de la vejez, como la fama asegura y muchos ejemplos lo
acreditan.
Manía es, en los que se van, creerse de mejor madera que los que
vienen, porque la raza humana, desde Caín acá, ha variado muy
poco en el fondo; pero ¿quién podrá negar que en el siglo que corre,
como en ningún otro, los usos y las costumbres y el aspecto exterior
de los hombres, ofrecen notabilísimas diferencias, de generación en
generación, de año en año, de día en día?
Tales y parecidas cavilaciones me asaltan la mente cada vez que,
obligado á ello por una irresistible exigencia de carácter, me detengo
á contemplar con infantil curiosidad esos enjambres de niños que á
las horas de paseo invaden las alamedas, y corren, y saltan, y
gritan, y dan vida, gracia y armonías, como los pájaros al bosque,
con sus regocijos y colores, á aquel monótono bamboleo de señores
graves y de jovenzuelas presumidas, que recorren, arriba y abajo, el
recto y empolvado arrecife, como tropa disciplinada en revista de
comisario.
¡Qué asombrosa variedad de formas, de matices, de adornos, de
calidades, la de aquellos arreos infantiles! No se ven dos vestidos
iguales, ni rapaz que no varíe el suyo tres veces á la semana; y
cada traje es lo que aparenta, es decir, que no es pana lo que
parece terciopelo, ni talco lo que por oro toma la vista.
Lo mismo que los trajes son los juguetes. El sable es de hierro
bruñido; la empuñadura, dorada; sus tirantes, de charol; y al ser
arrastrado con marcial donaire por el microscópico guerrero, vestido
rigorosamente de húsar ó de dragón, suena como los sables de
veras; la pistola es de hierro, y tiene articulaciones; y ya con un
corcho, haciendo el vacío, ó ya con un fulminante colocado en su
chimenea, produce tiros verdaderos; con el fusil sucede lo propio, y
además tiene bayoneta que encaja en la extremidad del brillante
cañón, con todas las reglas militares; las canicas son primores de
vidrio colorado; los coches remedan, en forma y calidad, resistencia
y comodidades, á los que ruedan en las calles, tirados por fogosos
brutos... Y así todo lo demás, porque la industria moderna,
explotando á maravilla estas debilidades humanas, tiene fábricas
colosales que no producen otra cosa.
Pues bien: yo me traslado con la memoria á los años de mi infancia,
y á los mismos sitios en iguales horas y circunstancias, y no puedo
menos de asombrarme de la diferencia que hallo entre el enjambre
que bulle entre mis recuerdos y el que tengo delante de los ojos.
Véome allí, entre mis contemporáneos, jugando á la gallina ciega, al
marro ó á las cuatro esquinas, tirando de vez en cuando un pellizco
al mendrugo de pan que se guardaba en el bolsillo para merendar, ó
formando parte del grupo que devoraba con los ojos un lorito de
cartón, tamaño como un huevo de gallina, que no soltaba de la
mano un camarada feliz á quien se le había traído su padre, no sé
de qué parte del mundo ni con qué fausto motivo; ó armando en
apartado rincón la media docena escasa de fementidos soldados de
plomo; véome, repito, con mi traje de todos los días, ó sea el
desechado de los domingos del año anterior, corto, descolorido y
opresor, amén de repasado y añadido. Y ¡qué traje!
Seguro estoy de que mis coetáneos no necesitan que yo se le
describa, pues no habiendo más que un modelo para todos, y
tirando con él hasta que nos vestían de muchachos, acordaránse de
él como si aún le tuvieran encima. Pero he de describirle, siquiera
para demostrar parte de mi tesis á los ojos de cuantos, más acá y á
la edad aquélla, han arrastrado por los suelos ricas lanas y
deslumbrantes sedas:
Un calzón, ceñido á la rodilla, con muchos frunces en la cintura, de
lo cual resultaba una culera (déjese el lector moderno de remilgos, y
acepte la palabra corriente entonces) monstruosa y exuberante, que
se bamboleaba á diestro y siniestro, según que las piernas se
movían; uníase á la cintura por innúmeros botones, otra en que
terminaba, sobre el vientre, una especie de blusa con mangas,
también fruncidas, y puños ajustados; sobre los hombros se tendía,
cayendo por detrás hasta media espalda, un cuello blanco llamado
vuelillo, en la cual prenda agotaban nuestras madres su paciencia,
su gusto, sus larguezas y su ingenio; por lo que los tales vuelecillos
eran ora calados, aliquando con encajes (de imitación, se entiende),
á veces bordados, y muy á menudo tenían una borlita en cada pico
delantero; medias blancas el que quería gastarlas, pues no era mal
visto ir en pernetas, y borceguíes de becerro hediondo, ni más finos
ni más relucientes que los que gastan hoy los peones del Muelle.
Sobre este conjunto, y faltando á todas las reglas arquitectónicas y
de buen gusto, una gorra de pana morada, muy ancha de plato y
muy estirado éste, como piel de pandero, por la virtud de un aro de
palo que tenía dentro, y de uno de cuyos bordes, creo que el
derecho, colgaban hasta los hombros dos borlas de canutillo,
descomunales.
Mientras todo esto era nuevo ó poco usado, llamábase vestido de
los domingos; cuando á los calzones se le habían soltado todas las
lorzas, y á la blusa los frunces, y además tenía ésta medias
mangas, y los otros refuerzos en las rodillas y en el trasero; y á la
gorra, ya sin borlas ó con los cordones solos, se le salía la punta del
aro roto por un lado, y cuando los borceguíes, con tapas, bigoteras y
medias suelas, sin lustre, orejillas ni correas, más servían de
grilletes que de amparo á los pies, llamábase, y pasaba á ser,
vestido de todos los días.
Y lo era tan al pie de la letra, que así se casara el rey ó se tomara á
Gibraltar, y el mundo se hundiera con música y cohetes, el traje de
los domingos no salía á luz más que en éstos ó en las fiestas de
guardar, bien especificadas en el calendario.
Á lo sumo, se nos permitía la media gala; es decir, poner con el
vestido viejo la gorra nueva ó los borceguíes flamantes.
En tal guisa íbamos á la escuela, y después al paseo, con el ya
citado mendrugo de pan en el bolsillo, comiéndole á retortijones
mientras corríamos, saltábamos ó nos contaban ó contábamos
cuentos de ladrones y encantados.
¿Quién de mis coetáneos podrá jactarse de haberse divertido en
estos lances sin que los calzones ó los zapatos se le reventaran por
alguna parte, y sin que asomara por ella medio palmo de camisa ó
el dedo gordo del pie, libre, desde mucho antes, de la prisión de la
media correspondiente?
Y yo pregunto ahora: ¿hay hijo de remendón de portal, que se
presente hoy en un paseo con el traje más raído que el de la flor y
nata de los rapazuelos de entonces? ¿Hay cuero que más dure,
colgado de una percha, que lo que duraba sobre nosotros un vestido
de...? yo no sé de qué demonios eran aquellas telas, y voy á decir
algo á este propósito.
Iba uno muy ufano con su madre á ver cómo ésta sacaba género
para un vestido que nos iban á hacer, después de estar dos meses
hablándonos de ello en casa, y prometiendo nosotros «ser buenos,
obedientes y aplicados».
—Saque usted tela de estas señas y de las otras,—decía la buena
señora, después de saludar á doña Sebastiana ó á otra apreciable
tendera por el estilo, y de haber preguntado ésta por todos y por
cada uno de los de nuestra casa, y de acusarnos in facie materna
de cualquier travesurilla que nos hubiera visto hacer delante de la
tienda, al salir de la escuela, con lo cual nos poníamos rojos de
vergüenza y de ira. Inmediatamente echaba sobre el mostrador una
pieza de lo pedido; y como la tienda había de ser obscura por
necesidad, nuestra madre salía hasta la calle con el género entre
brazos, siguiéndola nosotros y alzándonos sobre las puntas de los
pies para ver la codiciada tela, que desde luego nos enamoraba.
—Me parece demasiado fino esto,—decía nuestra madre cuando ya
había tentado, resobado y olido el género á la luz del sol, con lo cual
se nos caía el alma á los pies, y la ilusión con el alma.
—¿Para qué lo quería usted?—preguntaba la tendera.
—Para hacer un vestido á éste,—respondía la interpelada,
señalándonos á nosotros.
—¡Ah, es para el chico!—exclamaba la otra.—Entonces, tengo aquí
una cosa más á propósito.
Y del último rincón de la tienda, debajo de todos los recortes y
sobrantes del año, sacaba un retal infame, del color de todo lo
marchito y resobado, diciendo al propio tiempo:
—De esto mismo se han hecho un traje los niños de don Pedro de
Tal y de don Antonio de Cual.—Y como, para desgracia nuestra,
aquellos chicos, por ser hijos de pudientes notorios, daban el tono á
las modas, por el retal se decidía nuestra madre, después de la
indispensable porfía de media hora sobre el cuarto de más ó de
menos en vara.
—¿Y cuánto necesita usted?
—Lo de costumbre... La costurera dice...
—No se fíe usted mucho de ella.
—Como es quien ha de hacer el vestido... ¿Cuánto cree usted que
necesito?
—Pues tanto.
—Córtelo usted entonces... Pero aguarde usted... Necesito otra vara
más para cuchillos y medias mangas el año que viene, ¡porque este
chico crece tanto... y rompe!...
—Déjele usted lorzas.
—Siempre se las dejo; pero no le alcanzan ya las de las perneras
cuando se las suelto, y tengo que añadirles una tira. Mire usted que
este vestido que trae puesto, no tiene más que un año de uso.
—Aquí le compró usted, bien me acuerdo.
—Pues ya tiene dos refuerzos atrás, rodilleras y tres pares de
medias mangas... ¡Le digo á usted que son cuerpos de hierro los de
estos chicos de hoy!...
Juzgue ahora el lector de qué serían esos trajes cuando los
echábamos á todos los días, y cómo estarían cuando ni para diario
podíamos aprovecharlos ya.
Pero lo chusco era cuando, pasado este período de nuestra
existencia, salíamos de la primera enseñanza para entrar en la
segunda; es decir, cuando nos vestían de muchacho, lo cual era
nuestra gran ilusión, con chaquetilla pulga, pantalón de patencur,
chaleco de cabra, gorra de felpa atigrada, zapatos de tirante y
camisolín de crea. Como todo traje nuevo, este primero era para los
domingos; de manera que hasta que pasara á la categoría de viejo,
teníamos que andar todos los días con el ya especificado de niño,
sin lorzas y con pegas, si no había un padre ó un hermano que nos
socorriera con algún desecho.
No quiero decir nada de aquella primera levita que, andando el
tiempo, nos hacían, de cúbica ó de manfor, con una tira de tafetán,
de cuatro dedos por abajo y acabando en punta por arriba, que se
llamaba vuelta, ó embozo de los largos faldones; porque esa época
está fuera del alcance de estas reminiscencias, aunque sería otra
prueba más de que, en aquellos tiempos, las modas se eternizaban
sobre nosotros, y costaba un muchacho á su padre, en cuatro años,
la vigésima parte de lo que hoy le cuesta un niño en ocho meses.
Diré únicamente, por si no volvemos á hablar de esto y para
regodeo de los imberbes elegantes de ogaño, que estas levitas y
otras prendas anteriores y contemporáneas, eran hechas en casa
por la costurera; y que todavía, años andando, no nos medían las
espaldas Vázquez, Nieto ó Valentín, sin haber pasado antes por los
célebres Nerín y Pulpillo.
Apuntadas estas diferencias de aspecto entre aquellas
generaciones y la actual, digamos algo sobre los avíos de nuestros
juegos.
Para nosotros no producía la industria más que las canicas y los
botones; y digo «para nosotros», porque si bien es cierto que en los
Alemanes de la calle de San Francisco se vendían ermitaños,
zapateros y pocas chucherías más, de cartón pintado, nadie las
compraba. Allí se estaban en la vidriera, y allí se deshacían bajo el
peso de los años y del polvo.
Cuán raros eran estos juguetes en manos de los chicos de
entonces, pruébalo el ansia con que acudían á mi casa todos mis
camaradas á contemplar un carpintero que me había regalado un
pariente, el cual carpintero, al compás del glan-glen de su cigüeña
de alambre, movía los brazos, y con ellos una garlopa sobre un
banco; pruébalo asimismo la veneración que yo sentía por aquel
juguete, y los años que me duró.
En rigor de verdad, también había custodias, carritos y soldados de
plomo, en una tienda de la esquina del Puente.
Las canicas.—Las había de piedra barnizada, como hoy; de jaspe,
que escaseaban mucho; de cristal, que eran la octava maravilla, y,
por último, de betún, plebe de las canicas.
Las de piedra, que eran las más usuales, costaban á cuarto en la
tienda de Bohigas; pero sacadas á la calle, aun sin estrenar, no
valían más que tres maravedís; el otro se echaba á cara ó cruz. De
este modo se adquiría la primera canica, con la cual un buen
jugador ganaba una docena, que podía valerle doce cuartos, si al
venderlas tenía un poco de suerte jugando los maravedís del pico.
Advierto que como el género escaseaba y los muchachos no
pensaban en cosas más arduas, los compradores llovían en
derredor del afortunado.
La canica de jaspe valía dos cuartos en la tienda, seis maravedís en
la calle, ó canica y media de las negras. En cuanto á las de cristal,
no se cotizaban en la plaza. Poseíanlas siempre los pinturines ó
señoritos, ciertos niños mimosos que iban á clase y á paseo con
rodrigón, y jamás se manchaban los pantalones, ni se arrimaban á
la muchedumbre, ni bebían en las fuentes públicas. Jugaban aparte
con aquéllas, y, ó bien se les ufaban los otros, ó se las estrellaban
contra un banco de la Alameda, después de habérselas pedido
traidoramente para contemplarlas.
Las de betún se hacían con el de la azotea de las casas de Botín, ó
de los Bolados, único asfalto que existía en el pueblo. Cómo se
adquiría esa materia prima, yo no lo sé; pero es un hecho que nunca
faltaba betún para canicas. Éstas valían poco: tres por una de
piedra.
Los plomos.—Los buenos eran hechos de balas aplastadas. Se
adquirían á precios más varios que el de las canicas, que siempre
fué invariable. Se jugaban al bote y se negociaban del mismo modo
que aquéllas.
Los botones.—Eran preferidos los del Provincial de Laredo.
Tampoco me explico cómo sucedía que hubiera siempre botones
nuevos en el juego, no existiendo el batallón desde muchos años
atrás.—Se jugaban al bote, como los plomos, y, como éstos, se
cotizaban con variedad de precios.
El cobre de esta moneda eran las hormillas, que también se jugaban
al bote y se vendían siempre al desbarate.
Éstos, es decir, las canicas, los plomos y los botones, eran los
únicos objetos de diversión que podíamos adquirir hechos. Los
demás, como la espada, el fusil, el arco, la pistola, el látigo, la
pelota, el taco, etc., etc... teníamos que hacerlos á mano, ó pagar
muy caro el antojo al afortunado que ya poseyera el que nos faltaba;
siendo muy de advertir que, por única herramienta, teníamos un
cortaplumas viejo, con la hoja muy caída hacia atrás.
La espada era un pedazo de vara hendida ó arco barrilero, con otro
más corto, cruzado y amarrado convenientemente para formar la
empuñadura. Sujetábase el arma á la cintura por medio de un tirante
hecho ceñidor, ó descosiendo un pedazo de la del pantalón y
metiendo la hoja por la abertura resultante. El resto del equipo
militar, es decir, las charreteras, el tricornio, banda y
condecoraciones, era de papel.
El fusil era una astilla grande de cabretón, pulida, con ímprobos
trabajos, con el cortaplumas, ayudado á veces por el cuchillo de la
cocina, que si no cortaba más que él, estaba, en cambio, mucho
más sucio.
Pues habéis de saber, motilones que alborotáis hoy los paseos
vestidos de generales casi de verdad, que con aquellos arreos de
palo y de papel se dieron encarnizadas batallas en los Cuatro
Caminos y en el paseo del Alta.
Y esto me trae á las mientes el recuerdo de que yo fuí cabo primero
de la compañía mandada por el capitán Curtis, á las órdenes del
general Saba. No diré si entre los varios ejércitos que por el mismo
campo pululaban le había más bizarro; pero sí aseguro que no tuvo
rival el nuestro en táctica ni en disciplina.
Y no es extraño: aquel capitán de juguete que nos hacía conquistar
castillos imaginarios, trepar cerros y despeñarnos por
derrumbaderos, escalar los árboles, atravesar bardales por lo más
espeso y saltar las tapias sin tocar las piedras más que con las
manos, todo por vía de instrucción y ensayo, es hoy uno de los
coroneles más organizadores, más bizarros, más sufridos y más
fogueados del ejército español[6]. Por cierto que fué él el único
soldado de veras que dió aquella tropa de soldados de afición:
todos, incluso el general, trocamos las armas por las letras (las de
cambio inclusive).
Doy por hecho que este recuerdo evocado será con exceso pueril, y
quizá impertinente, si no de mal gusto, para los lectores que no
alcanzaron los Mártires en la Puntida, ni á Caral en el Instituto, y que
hicieron en ferrocarril su primer viaje á la Universidad; pero, salvo el
respeto que estos señores me merecen, no borro este detalle de mis
tiempos, en gracia siquiera del ansia con que han de devorarle los
soldados de mi compañía que aún anden, por su ventura ó su
desgracia, entre los vivos de este valle de lágrimas, y acierten á
pasar la vista por estos renglones que escribo á vuela pluma... no sé
por qué; quizá movido de esa necesidad del espíritu que obliga á
vivir de los recuerdos cuando comienzan á escasear las ilusiones,
porque el sendero recorrido es más largo que el que nos queda por
andar. Quien tenga á menos pagarse todavía de estas pequeñeces,
que vuelva la hoja y pase á otro capítulo; quien sienta agitársele el
alma en el pecho al contacto de estas reminiscencias de la mejor
edad de la vida, óigame lo poco que me falta decir entre lo mucho
que me hormiguea en la memoria y tengo que apartar de ella por no
caber en el propósito que he formado ahora.
La pistola.—Componíase de una culata de pino, hecha á navaja, y
de un cañón de hoja de lata, arrollado á mano y reforzado con
alambre. Eran muy estimados para este objeto los tubos de los
paraguas antiguos, que no tenían abertura al costado para dar paso
al resorte que mantenía plegadas las varillas. De cualquier modo,
tapábase uno de sus extremos con un corcho ó con un taco de
madera, bien ajustado y sujeto por medio de otro alambre al tubo
que se colocaba luego en la ranura de la culata, á la cual se
amarraba con cabos de zapatero. En seguida se abría el oído con la
punta del cortaplumas, si el tubo era de caña, ó con un clavo, si era
de latón; y al Prado de Viñas, ó á la Maruca, á hacer salvas.
Generalmente uno construía el arma y otro adquiría la pólvora:
ambas adquisiciones eran superiores á las fuerzas de un muchacho
solo. Por eso las salvas eran también á medias, si, como era muy
frecuente, después de estar cinco minutos chisporroteando el figón,
ó cucurucho de pólvora amasada con agua, sobre el oído, no salía
el primer tiro por éste ó por la culata, llevándose el tapón que, por un
milagro, no se llevaba á su vez, al pasar, la tapa de los sesos del
que sostenía la pistola en su mano, ó del asociado que se colocaba
junto á él después de haber encendido el figón con un fósforo de los
cuarenta que contenía cada tira de cartón, comprada al efecto por
dos cuartos.
Conocí algunos afortunados que poseían cañoncitos de bronce.
Eran éstos los Krupps de aquella artillería, y como á tales se les
respetaba y se les temía.
El arco.—Aunque los había de madera, asequibles á todos los
muchachos, juzgábase sin él quien no le tuviera de ballena de

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Marxism and History Second Edition

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Marxism and History

Theory and History

1st edition: © Red Globe Press, an imprint of Macmillan Education UK 2002

Cover illustration: theendup/Alamy Stock Photo

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Making History elaborated Marx’s philosophy of history not how he applied

servile status); in modern capitalism, large capitalist employers exploit people

Three Generations of Marxist History

to indicate the dimensions of the Marxist school as a whole. These dimen-

Germany, military history and Christianity. This selection necessarily excludes

Marxist History’s Wide Panorama

Old and New History

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 9

Despite criticism of Marxism in these fields, Marxists were consequently

Their careful non-reductionist reading of Marx emphasised the ‘circuit of

Reconstruction (1935) examined how the American Civil War unleashed an

In the feverish agrarian discontent of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,

The Long and Short of It

counselling caution about modes of production, Jairus Banaji challenged the

Rosa Luxembourg’s view of mass strikes.36 Adolfo Gully produced a history

Concepts and Theory

concept of ‘methodological nationalism’ or how the most pervasive hidden

Marx’s analysis of society although devised in the course of an effort to under-

Theoretical discussions have turned polemical as with E.P. Thompson

Stalinism and Marxist History

in Talmon’s Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1966) in which the Enlight-

Marx and Engels’s Conception of History

The impression that Marx is difficult to read is widespread. However, core

History and the Enlightenment

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 29

During the eighteenth century the horizons of historical investigation

Hegel, the German idealist philosopher, was particularly influential on the

1. All things are in themselves contradictory (See the unity of opposites in

Can Human History Be Scientific?

this was Marx’s prodigious empirical investigation in whatever field he was

The Distinctiveness of Human Labour

The Forces of Production

of nature massively expanded the productive forces at human disposal. Over

Social Relations of Production

The Clash Between the Forces

[4] Tercio de contribución próximo á vencer.

Esto de comparar tiempos con tiempos, no es siempre una manía

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