RethinkingHistory"FromBelow"

RethinkingHistory"FromBelow"

byLymanH.Legters

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Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:4/1986,pages:506507,onwww.ceeol.com.

RETHINKING HISTORY 'FROM BELOW'

Lyman Legters When Wolf Schiifer and I first discussed our respective papers (Vol. 4, No. 4, January 1985) with the editors of Praxis International, it was thought that they might form the nucleus of a symposium on the combined problematic of mental and manual labor within the Marxian revolutionary movement, and what Schiifer calls "the suppression of uneducated thinking from below through learned discourse from above." Ultimately we all agreed that the two papers should simply be published side-by-side in the hope that they might precipitate discussion in future issues of the journal. It was understood that each of us might wish to initiate such discussion by commenting on the other's argument. Since my article was essentially a response to an earlier essay by Schiifer, published in another journal, the comments that follow refer specifically to his more recent article in this journal. 1. As before, I agree with Schiifer that the history of Marxism, both as a corpus of theory and as a social movement, discloses an 'underside,' a body of proletarian thinking that, whether suppressed or merely ignored, is eminently worthy of recapture. What is to be made of any such recovery of historical evidence cannot, however, be determined in advance: if suppression can be demonstrated, that is ipso facto of critical significance, but the losing side in an argument does not, it seems to me, have any special or privileged standing in our retrospective judgment, irrespective of class or occupational status. 2. As regards Marx himself, I think it serves no purpose to conceal his intellectual arrogance; but the famous encounter with Weitling becomes a one-sided distortion if it is emphasized to the exclusion of instances where tolerance prevailed (even if that tolerance was merely tactical). I see no reason to suppose that the Marxian precept excludes that function we ordinarily call leadership, and-again-I would be most reluctant to accord a privileged standing to any particular leadership merely because of class origin or occupational credential. 3. In keeping with my contemporary application of the discussion to the Polish situation, I believe (and I think Schiifer would probably agree) that Marxist intellectuals have an obligation to surges of working class rebellion wherever they occur that transcends their fidelity to their own mental labor. The KOR style of response strikes me as exemplary in this regard. My account did, however, stop short of those issues that arise when a more or less spontaneous working class movement turns into a popular, society-wide (classless?) resistance. But while that phenomenon deserves fuller exploration, it does not modify my central point so far as I can discern. 4. Schiifer's invocation of Freudian modes of explanation is doubtless interesting in its own right, but it does not strike me as an essential procedure
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or much of an advance over ordinary historiographical procedures (which are the ones he used to uncover a particular suppression). Historians were discovering oversights and explaining suppressions long before Freud appeared and, it might be added, Marx himself can be quite useful as a guide to explaining suppressions of pertinent evidence (though perhaps not those of w4ich he may himself have been guilty!). 5. The discussion cannot be fruitfully pursued very much further, I think, without a more precise and critical assessment of the weight to be assigned to class origin, occupational status, and the possibility of movement by an individual across class and occupational lines. I do not think that we are likely to clarify matters by absolutizing any of those or by freezing them at some point in time. As a historian I would be inclined (as I intimated in my article) to seek illumination through closer examination of particular cases, especially that of French syndicalism. Perceived at the time as anti-Marxist (partly because of what they claimed about themselves, partly no doubt by reason of anarchist associations), the syndicalists were certainly the enemy of social democratic party bureaucracies as well as vanguard party conceptions of their time. Yet they preserved a Marxian accent on self-emancipation that had all but disappeared among orthodox Marxists. It may be that Marx contributed in perverse ways to that disappearance, but then we are entitled to deplore his conduct on the strength of his own theoretical teaching.