materialism in a way that opened the door to a great dose of voluntarism.
For the 1950s new left, this meant moving away from any tight definition of class or any real concern with how social being might affect social consciousness. In the writings about current events by the most prominent British new left figure, EP Thompson - right through from his 1960 essay 'Revolution' [15] to his anti cruise missile writings of 1980 - there is the insistent message that energy and goodwill and a repudiation of tight categories can be enough in themselves to open the road to victory. In his more theoretical writings he rejects the view that 'economic' factors play any sort of determining role in history, or even that they can be separated out from other factors such as the ideological or judicial. [16]
Althusser's tone is different: in his earlier writings the key to change is still a party of an essentially Stalinist sort. But there is the same element of voluntarism as in Thompson: if only the party understands the articulation of the different structures, it can force the pace of history, regardless of 'economic' factors.
Most of his followers have abandoned any notion of 'determination', even in 'the last instance', and have moved to positions that deny any possibility of understanding how societies change. So, for instance, one English post-Althusserian, Gareth Stedman Jones, now tells us that the only way to understand any ideology is in its own terms and that you must not make any attempt to interpret its development in terms of the material circumstances of those who adhere to it. [17] We are right back to the old empiricist adage, 'Everything is what it is and nothing else. 'Such is the mouse that the elephantine structures of Althusserianism have given birth to.
The convergence of the old new left and the Althusserians has created a sort of 'common sense' among Marxists which holds that any talk of base and superstructure is really old hat. So widespread has the influence of this 'common sense' been that it has even affected people who reject completely the political conclusions of Thompson or Althusser. [18]
The only concerted resistance to this tendency has come from admirers of the orthodox analytical philosopher GA Cohen. [19] But his defence of Marx involves a complete retreat to the mechanical interpretation of Kautsky and Plekhanov. br/>
The revolutionary materialist alternative
Historically, however, there has always been a revolutionary alternative to either mechanical materialism or voluntarism. It existed in part even in the heyday of Kautskyism in some of the writings of Engels and in the work of the Italian Marxist, Labriola. [20]
But the need for a theoretical alternative did not become more widely apparent until the years of the First World War and the Russian Revolution proved the bankruptcy of Kautskyism. It was then that Lenin reread Hegel and concluded, 'Intelligent (dialectical) idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid (metaphysical) materialism '. [21]
In the years that followed, thinkers like George LukГЎcs, Karl Korsch and Antonio Gramsci all tried to provide versions of historical materialism which did not see human activity as simply a passive reflection of other factors. And in his magnificent History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky provided an account of a world historical event which placed massive emphasis on subjective as well as objective factors - and was criticised from a Plekhanovite point of view for doing so. [22]
A non-mechanical, non-voluntarist version of historical materialism is absolutely vital today. It can easily be found in the works of Marx himself, if you supplement his classic account in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy with what he says at various points in The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, The Communist Manifesto, and elsewhere.
Production and society
Marx first sets out his account of historical materialism in The German Ideology of 1846.
He starts from a materialist recognition that human beings are biologically part of nature:
'The premises from which we start are not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find existing and those which they produce by their own activity.
The first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relationship to the rest of nature ... The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the actions of men.
We must begin by stating the firs...
