Ordinary history: our modern social historians often invoke Karl Marx, but have they read him?

Our modern social historians often invoke Karl Marx, but have they read him?

THE National History Standards (NHS), a document that created a storm of controversy in 1994, compelling the Senate to vote overwhelmingly to condemn it, has been revised to the satisfaction of many of its critics. Yet the document still remains flawed conceptually, in part because it continues to reflect the "new social history" that has come almost to dominate the history profession in the United States. The shibboleth is "history from the bottom up," with attention to all those who had been forgotten in past historiography, specifically racial minorities, laborers, and women, and with emphasis on the ordinary rather than the exceptional.

The new social history focuses more on social relations than on political institutions, and it cannot readily deal with the nature of power, because that necessitates facing the question of success. For all their incantations of "class formation" in relation to labor history, social historians have yet to demonstrate how a class of people gains consciousness of its own interests, and how those at the bottom come together and take shape as a political force.

Furthermore, in the study of American history, the social historian appears to have focused his attention on the wrong class. Even Karl Marx, in whose name social historians frequently write, knew that it was not the working class but the middle classes that drove history along its progressive path. Social historians search the lower depths to find "class consciousness," but it was the entrepreneurial-merchant class that actually carried out the historical task of liberation and modernization and self-actualization. Marx himself suggested in what sense the middle class is the protagonist of history by virtue of having a higher consciousness of what history has wrought: "Liberation from the point of view of the bourgeoisie -- competition -- was the only possible way during the eighteenth century to open up the individual to a new career and for freer development. The theoretical proclamation of this consciousness which corresponded to bourgeois practices, the consciousness of mutual exploitation as the general relation of all individuals to one another, was a daring and outspoken sign of progress, a secular enlightenment in relation to the political, patriarchal, religious, and sentimental embellishments of exploitation under feudalism."

In its reverence for early Africa and pre-Columbian America, the NHS seems to have no understanding that not only did America skip the feudal stage of history, but that in the United States the dynamic of history is not from the bottom up but from the top down. In the Grundrisse Marx wrote: "Capital's ceaseless striving toward the general form of wealth drives labor beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material element for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labor also therefore appears no longer as labor, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e., an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces."

Marx never mistook the liberating rise of capitalism for its later corporate manifestations; nor did he see the underdeveloped world offering anything that students living in modern societies need to learn about in respect to the meaning of power in the industrializing world. He reminded readers of the New York Daily Tribune "that the bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world. . . . Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth."

The NHS offers teachers of American history the "great convergence" thesis, namely, that America had its founding in the coming together of three civilizations: fifteenth-century Islamic West Africa, pre-Columbian America, and Northern Europe, which opened up in the New World the age of exploration. Actually, the pre-modern world, rather than "converging" in America, remained imprisoned in a mentality of blind necessity. In the Grundrisse Marx describes "an utterly delightful cry of outrage on the part of a West Indian plantation owner." The owner, pleading for the reintroduction of black slavery, complains of how "the Quashees (the free blacks of Jamaica) content themselves with producing only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption, and, along side this 'use value,' regard loafing (indulgence and idleness) as the real luxury good; how they do not care a damn for the sugar and the fixed capital invested in the plantations, but rather observe the planters' impending bankruptcy with an ironic grin of malicious pleasure, and even exploit their acquired Christianity as an embellishment for this mood of malicious glee and indolence."