History

Bryan D. Palmer

At its most basic, “history” designates what ­happened in the past. However, the past is not a simple uncontested truth. Although radicals can all allude to how “history shows that x,” the “lessons” drawn from history would, of course, be very different depending on what any particular radical wanted to emphasize.

Feminists, for instance, can point to how his-story has too often been a record of male presence. According to feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham (1973), this left half of humanity is “hidden from history.” In response, American radical feminist Robin Morgan (1970) coined the counter-term “her-story” in Sisterhood Is Powerful, a pioneering anthology of 1960s feminism. As a corrective to the neglect of women’s experiences and contributions to history, her-stories aimed to reinsert women into the frameworks used to understand the past and to transform everyday gender practices in the present.

For his part, Henry Ford exemplified the reactionary ten­dency to repudiate history when he declared that, as far as he was concerned, “history is bunk” (New York Times 1921). The narcissism of the present-minded (and radicals can sometimes themselves be guilty of this) follows this course by declaring that only what currently exists is of importance. Yesterday’s news is outmoded and inconsequential, apparently of no importance: “That’s history.”

In the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective’s Days of War, Nights of Love, this repudiation is taken to new heights. Here CrimethInc. excoriates “the dead hand of the past” while insisting that “those who cannot forget” what is over and done with are condemned to repeat it. In contrast, “if we dare to throw ourselves into the unknown and unpredictable, to continually seek out situations that force us to be in the present moment, we can break free of feelings of inevitability and inertia that constrain our lives—and, in those instances, step outside of history.” To accomplish this aim, CrimethInc. confidently calls for a revolutionary embrace of myth and its ostensibly democratic storytelling impulse. Such raconteur radicalism, moreover, claims to sidestep the twin traps that CrimethInc. rejects: false impartiality and objective truth (109–14).

Obviously extreme, this approach flies in the face of centuries of radical thought. Radical thinkers have long posited history not as some all-encompassing straitjacket but as a field within which agency and determination wrestle. Between structured imposition and human activity mobilized to critique, challenge, and change social inequalities lay histories that we jettison, as radicals, at our peril. Myth may seem like an attractive alternative (and indeed at times myth grows out of this confrontational past); however, myth has also sustained a range of far more dubious possibilities. Every nationalist project, for instance, is sustained by myth; so too are all racist and xenophobic endeavors.

In the reciprocities of past and present, there is no getting around the fundamental realities of social struggle. This is the stuff of both history and myth. The fact that the form in which this past has been related to the present has privileged conventional histories that justify power (on the one hand) and myth-type storytelling that seemingly leaves more room for alternative outcomes (on the other) is no reason to refuse the radical potential of “history.” Rather, the task is to remake historical understanding so that, in the words of E.P. Thompson, “the enormous condescension of posterity” does not silence dissent or reduce history to prepackaged inevitability (1966, 12). Radicals therefore tend to have a more consistent regard for history (both as precedent and as illustration of possibility) than do either those on the left who reject history or those on the right committed to preserving the status quo. This radical appreciation of history itself has a long history.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1978), for instance, drew upon Hegel’s world-historic spirit of human development—albeit in ways that turned it on its head. What resulted was a materialized appreciation of the past that revised understandings of causality and shifted the analysis of society so that interpretation could aid in charting socio-economic transformations. In this way, they replaced metaphysics (God) and the primacy of thought (“In the beginning was the word”) with concrete considerations of physical environments, modes of production, class formations, and the ways that changes in these realms ordered human history. Known as historical materialism, this orientation reconfigured how “history” was understood. Subsequently, no serious radical project could ever jettison historical consideration. For Frederic Jameson, the maxim became: “Always historicize!” (1981, 9).

Social justice is by no means assured by or confirmed within history. Nevertheless, addressing the past with a sophisticated appre­ciation of its struggles over a terrain marked by difference and contradictory demands can strengthen the hand of those committed to ending oppression. For this reason, “history” is never far from the radical imagination. In contemporary radical circles, however, such imagination is increasingly informed by questions of identity. As a result, current interpretations of history have tended toward the particularistic, and “history” is rarely invoked as a totality encompassing all peoples.

Postmodernism’s influence, moreover, has left many radicals increasingly suspicious of “master narratives” and categories. As Perry Anderson succinctly noted, “the defining trait of the postmodern condition is the loss of credibility of these meta-­narratives” (1998, 25). Ostensibly composed of discrete constituencies, history within such postmodern paradigms is often reduced to the recounting of experiences of marginality. However important, such a focus tends to fragment realities that are in fact consolidations of power and authority. As the operations of the multicultural state suggest, particularized identities can be de-radicalized through celebration. The mainstreaming of Black History Month, for instance, has had the ironic effect of cleansing a history of racist oppression through representations of advancement. In this way, it both dulls the radical edge of past struggles for equality and suggests that ongoing struggle has become unnecessary (see Palmer 1990, 2000; Jacoby 1994).

History, of course, is not new. Its record is physically etched wherever men and women first gathered. Later it would take form within oral traditions. In the Hellenic world, “history” emerged as a word alongside other linguistic designations associated with “civil­ization,” including “academy,” “school,” and “logic.” The Greek word “historia” first meant merely “knowledge gained by inquiry” (Barfield 1967, 37, 105). Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth century, “history” came to be understood as a narrative of human developments linked to and shaping the present. “History” was thus separated from earlier writings, including the fifteenth-­century Shakespearian dramas that had been “histories” (as opposed to “comedies” or “tragedies”) at the time of their writing. As a genealogy of power (concerned with war and the human face of governance), history struggled to be less ­didactic and to rely on more than the privileged oral tradition of select interlocutors.

Philosophically, this move was captured in the eighteenth century by Giambattista Vico’s meditations on history. A professor of rhetoric, Vico’s The New Science (1968) suggested ways of appreciating how the complex weave of determination set a stage upon which humans struggled and produced outcomes that were both paradoxical and progressive. According to E. P. Thompson, Vico’s work stood as an important “precursor of historical materialism” (1978, 86). Combined with the Enlightenment, political upheavals like the French Revolution, and the emergence of socialism and historical materialism in the nineteenth century, this expansive sense of “history” established the foundation upon which the radical appreciation of history would consolidate during the twentieth century.

Revolutions, rebellious social movements, and popular insurgencies prompted radical understandings of both the past and its potential contributions to struggles in the present—a dynamic reflected in Leon Trotsky’s canonical History of the Russian Revolution (1932). Concurrently, “history” was also being constructed in more mainstream and academic ways. Ordered by a compilation of empirical facts, the so-called “scientific history” of Leopold von Ranke adopted an approach that coincided with capitalism’s Industrial Revolution and, in its fixation on ostensibly empirically verifiable fact, channeled historical investigation in decidedly conservative directions (Iggers and Powell 1990; Grafton 1997). This approach came to dominate the study of history in universities, where consensus (not conflict) tended to be the interpretive paradigm.

Historicism resulted. A reigning ideology of the mid-twentieth century, it fit well with Cold War orthodoxies, in which champion­ing capitalism meant demonizing collectivist projects like the Soviet Union. As an approach, it repudiated radical understandings of “history” by insisting that all inquiry into the past rely on the seeming transparency of known evidence while eschewing abstract thought. Theorizing was increasingly suspect; overarching analytic frameworks were rejected. By the mid-twentieth century, consensus within history, structural functionalism within sociology, and a generalized agreement about what Daniel Bell (1960) called “the end of ideology” congealed to produce complacency within the university. One of the attractions of Thompson’s (1966) influential study of class formation in England’s Industrial Revolution was that it took direct aim at this consolidated paradigm by attacking structural functionalist views of class, pillorying notions that history was governed by consensus, and rejecting claims that ideas had ceased animating struggles for human betterment. Through the challenge to conventional thought that erupted in the 1960s, and especially through the protests of 1968, the radical approach to “history” blossomed (see Bernstein 1968; Lemisch 1975).

Over the course of the past half-century, conventional understandings of history have been shattered. This process was well underway when, during the 1970s, Raymond Williams concluded that history, “in different hands, teaches or shows us most kinds of knowable past and almost every kind of imaginable future” (1976, 120). The women’s/feminist history that emerged during the late 1960s has spawned gender history (in which both femininities and masculinities are considered), lesbian history, family history, cultural histories of various kinds, and histories of bodies and emotions inspired by the work of Michel Foucault. What counts as a historical subject or historical evidence has changed to the point that what counts as “history” today bears little resemblance to how it was imagined in the past.

Conveying the democratizing, critical, and anticapitalist substance of historical gains to mass audiences has been an enduring radical concern. The notion of a “people’s history” opposed to mainstream academic wisdom has been around since at least the 1880s and the Knights of Labor, though it gained momentum in the 1930s with the rise of various national communist parties. Radical movements have developed educational forums in which such histories are routinely discussed as a central component of organizational recruitment and education. Howard Zinn’s (1980) A People’s History of the United States made important contributions to the development of such histories. For their part, more radical historians like Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman (2005) have promoted comics format presentations of historical social movements, while groups like Canada’s Graphic History Collective have produced comic-book style histories of May Day and other mobilizations stretching from the 1880s to the 1990s. Justseeds, a decentralized artists’ cooperative, celebrates people’s history with a poster series.

In knowing more history, and in knowing history differently, radicals are required to see their present struggles with more sophistication than was demanded of any previous generation. Recognition of history’s differentiated multitudes runs the risk of particularizing politics. The balance that radicals must achieve today entails a sensitive appreciation of diversity that does not undermine a strategic sense of the ways these specificities form a whole. Similarly, knowing how various groups have experienced lives of both subordination and struggle is indispensable to forging resistance in the present. For radicals, reflection on how resistance can be rallied (history as pedagogy) and on how history can inspire (history as example), suggests that “history” can inform the present in important ways. Significantly, it can help make our period one of activism rather than accommodation. If this is to happen, however, an appreciation not only of difference but also of the totality of social forces is necessary.

If, as the radical historian E. J. Hobsbawm (1971) once wrote, the task is to move from a fully grasped social history to a history of society, the radical informed by history will be cognizant of the complexities of identity while grasping the importance of waging struggles that address the totalizing means by which exploitation and oppression are deepened. Such universalism will also inform the project of creating alternatives to our current destructive reality.

See also: Agency; Authority; Experience; Future; Ideology; Materialism; Representation; Zionism