It seems rather appropriate to inaugurate this blog with some scattered musings on the pithy quote from which the moniker ‘history’s midwife’ is derived. So, naturally, we turn to Marx.
Delving into Das Kapital (vol. 1), amid descriptions of the extraordinarily brutal processes of expropriation systematically unleashed in 16th century England on the waning peasantry at the bidding of the burgeoning capitalist class (a process therein referred to as ‘primitive accumulation’), the reader stumbles upon the following rhetorical flourish: “force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one.” (p. 916). Here violence figures not only as the ‘secret’ of primitive accumulation as alluded to in the first chapter of section 8 of Das Kapital (titled [duh] “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation”), but is, more grandly, the key to history itself. Marx’s intent here is, unsurprisingly, somewhat polemical. He seeks to turn the conceptual apparatus of traditional political economy, - with its idyllic, consensual model of economic origins, - on its head (we can only assume this sort of polemical upending ranked among Marx’s favorite past-times, noting his widely-repeated and oft-misquoted witticism about old Hegel standing on his head). Such fiery motives may be gleaned via a cursory reading of the aforementioned introductory chapter to section 8, where Marx repeatedly draws distinction between the ‘tender annals of political economy,’ in which “the idyllic reigns from time immemorial,” and ‘actual history’ in which “it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part” (p. 874).
But, of course, Marx’s claim is much broader than one of merely relaying the origins of capitalist societies. Indeed, in a certain light, this quip could be taken as a succinct summation of one reading of Marx’s theory of history, - more or less the thoroughly structural theory of history offered in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The prime agents of this historical narrative appear in the garb of the ‘forces of production’ (the totality of means indispensable to the current level of production, spanning from the latest technology all the way down to human brains and muscle) and the ‘relations of production’ (the system of relations constitutive of a given mode of production, i.e., relations between classes), who at a certain historical juncture find themselves at odds with one another, and thus impel - in Marx’s own words - ‘an epoch of social revolution.’ The conventional agent of political transformation, - namely, the human being, - seems to drop out of the equation here for Marx. It’s as if action (that is to say free action, action congenial to 'man' qua political agent) were not imperative for the event of social revolution. The mechanics of history do all the work. That is to say, history acts in humanity’s stead.
The 20th century bares the wounds of an epoch that has come face to face with such a fated understanding of history; one whose topography is the product of that dreadfully viral Enlightenment brainchild known as ‘progress.’ Alduous Huxley, in light of the wracked state of the world circa 1948, takes on Marx’s famous adage with a witty inversion; from the pages of his Ape and Essence: “remember that phrase of Karl Marx’s: ‘Force is the midwife of Progress.’ He might have added – but of course Belial didn’t want to let the cat out of the bag at that early stage of the proceedings – that Progress is the midwife of Force” (p. 94, Huxley is, of course, paraphrasing, though it is a summary with which we must find ourselves in agreement, - how else may we make sense of a ‘pregnant’ epoch than by gleaning from it a lineage of progress?). Goofy Belial-rhetoric aside, Huxley’s inversion hints to the perils of such an ideology of historical fatedness. In occluding the centrality of human action in history, ‘progress’ obviates the demands of justification; the most deplorable of possibilities are opened up so long as they are in step with the march of history. Acting in the name of progress, the violence one perpetrates is not of one’s own hands; it is bloodshed atoned for by the vicissitudes of history. Progress’ obstetricians know no responsibility of their own. And hence, in my slapdash historical analysis, the terror of 1793-94, the Moscow trials of the 1930’s, and the final solution of 1942.
In closing, it should be remarked that this is not the only reading of history we are offered by Marx. As has been repeatedly observed, despite his overt systematicity Marx’s thought is oft ambivalent if not flatly contradictory. Indeed, there are myriad clues that point toward a radically different understanding of history in Marx, - and indeed, toward a radically emancipatory one. As Cornelius Castoriadis points out, this reading is perhaps most evident in Marx’s third Theses on Feuerbach: “the materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator himself… the coincidence of changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionizing practice” (p. 144). This is the emancipatory kernel of Marx’s thought, comprised within the sometimes-dreary shell of his economistic-mechanistic philosophy of history. It is, as Castoriadis relays, an injunction for political action as self-creation; a statement of the irreducibility of human agency and a call for revolution as the rupture of the new. Of course, the question still looms as to whether Marx himself - in the final analysis - granted the irreducibility of human action the full weight it is owed or whether his traditional instincts led him to relegate the activity of politics to the status of 'mere' obstetrics. Regardless, such an interpretive query should not eclipse from us the heritage of political action which brought to Marx's attention the 'free gift' of human agency. If the Marxian legacy is to remain relevant for today's weary left it is as part and parcel of such a heritage that it must be resuscitated.
