4.99 - legters, lyman h. - rethinking history 'from below' (en)

7/30/2019 4.99 - Legters, Lyman H. - Rethinking History 'From Below' (en)

1/3

The following ad supports maintaining our C.E.E.O.L. service

Rethinking History "From Below"

Rethinking History "From Below"

by Lyman H. Legters

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 4 / 1986, pages: 506-507, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=1a2cd39c-1a20-48e9-a565-08c4dc602096http://www.ceeol.com/


2/3

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 thatthey might form the nucleus of a symposium on the combined problematic ofmental and manual labor within the Marxian revolutionary movement, andwhat Schiifer calls "the suppression of uneducated thinking from belowthrough learned discourse from above." Ultimately we all agreed that the twopapers should simply be published side-by-side in the hope that they mightprecipitate discussion in future issues of the journal. It was understood thateach of us might wish to initiate such discussion by commenting on the other'sargument. Since my article was essentially a response to an earlier essay bySchiifer, published in another journal, the comments that follow referspecifically to his more recent article in this journal.1. As before, I agree with Schiifer that the history of Marxism, both as acorpus of theory and as a social movement, discloses an 'underside,' a body ofproletarian thinking that, whether suppressed or merely ignored, is eminentlyworthy of recapture. What is to be made of any such recovery of historicalevidence cannot, however, be determined in advance: if suppression can bedemonstrated, that is ipso facto of critical significance, but the losing side in anargument does not, it seems to me, have any special or privileged standing inour retrospective judgment, irrespective of class or occupational status.2. As regards Marx himself, I think it serves no purpose to conceal hisintellectual arrogance; but the famous encounter with Weitling becomes aone-sided distortion if it is emphasized to the exclusion of instances wheretolerance prevailed (even if that tolerance was merely tactical). I see no reasonto suppose that the Marxian precept excludes that function we ordinarily callleadership, and-again-I would be most reluctant to accord a privilegedstanding to any particular leadership merely because of class origin oroccupational credential.3. In keeping with my contemporary application of the discussion to thePolish situation, I believe (and I think Schiifer would probably agree) thatMarxist intellectuals have an obligation to surges of working class rebellionwherever they occur that transcends their fidelity to their own mental labor.The KOR style of response strikes me as exemplary in this regard. Myaccount did, however, stop short of those issues that arise when a more or lessspontaneous 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 doubtlessinteresting in its own right, but it does not strike me as an essential procedurePraxis Inlernalional6:4 January 1987 0260--8448 $2.00


3/3

Praxis International 507or much of an advance over ordinary historiographical procedures (which arethe ones he used to uncover a particular suppression). Historians werediscovering oversights and explaining suppressions long before Freudappeared and, it might be added, Marx himself can be quite useful as a guideto explaining suppressions of pertinent evidence (though perhaps not those ofw4ich he may himself have been guilty!).5. The discussion cannot be fruitfully pursued very much further, Ithink, without a more precise and critical assessment of the weight to beassigned to class origin, occupational status, and the possibility of movementby an individual across class and occupational lines. I do not think that we arelikely to clarify matters by absolutizing any of those or by freezing them atsome point in time. As a historian I would be inclined (as I intimated in myarticle) 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 byreason of anarchist associations), the syndicalists were certainly the enemy ofsocial democratic party bureaucracies as well as vanguard party conceptions oftheir time. Yet they preserved a Marxian accent on self-emancipation that hadall but disappeared among orthodox Marxists. It may be that Marx contributed in perverse ways to that disappearance, but then we are entitled todeplore his conduct on the strength of his own theoretical teaching.

AccessviaCEEOL NL Germany

4.99 - legters, lyman h. - rethinking history 'from below' (en)

Documents