"Marxism" and the Politics of History: Reflections on the Work of Eugene D. Genovese

"Marxism"

The title of this essay should be "Historiography 'R' Us." Three years ago, Lloyd Gardner urged me to participate in a roundtable discussion of William Appleman Williams at the Organization of American Historians conference along with Paul Buhle, Justus Doenecke, Patty Limerick, and Leo Ribuffo; a good time was had by all. Now here I am about to discuss Williams's counterpart, ally, and nemesis in the renaissance of Marxist scholarship, which began in the 1950s and became the mainstream of historical scholarship in the United States by the 1970s. Let's hope that we have as good a time, and that Bill and Gene will understand each other better in the historiographical hereafter. ¹

I want to start with my lack of credentials as a way of suggesting that Genovese's work has been and will remain important to historians as such, not merely to those who study nineteenth-century America. I am not an expert on antebellum southern history, although I do teach courses in which I have to explain the development of slavery. I am not an authority on Eugene Genovese, although, like most historians my age, I learned how to apply Marxist categories to the American archive by reading The Political Economy of Slavery, In Red and Black, The World the Slaveholders Made—this is still my favorite—and Roll, Jordan, Roll. More recently, I have sampled what might be called the "later works," and have found them just as interesting if not as stimulating and methodologically transportable as the "early works." ²

Like everyone else's, my approach to Marx was determined by my prior encounter with avowed Marxists—Genovese and Williams, to begin with, but also the canonical Brits of 1970s scholarship (Maurice Dobb, Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, George Rude, Raymond Williams, Christopher Hill) and of course my own teachers (Marvin Rosen, C. H. George, Alfred Young, Carl Parrini, and Martin Sklar) at Northern Illinois University, who assigned them. So I cannot claim to be an authority on "Marxism," either, unless all we mean by that is the arguments over Marx that began in the late nineteenth century. At any rate, that is all I will mean by it: it just is the citation and resignification of Marx's texts permitted or determined—in a word, mediated—by subsequent interpretations of those texts. We can't peek over the edges of these interpretations as if they were not there, as if there were some inert, undefiled, or transcendent text constituting the "Marxism of Marx"; all we can or should do in defense of "Marxism," then, is to keep the conversation going about the Marxists we have put to use. Just like we're doing today. ³

By this pluralist accounting, the affiliates of "Marxism" would include Georg Lukács, Max Weber, Edward Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Michael Kalecki, Joan Robinson, William English Walling, E. R. A. Seligman, Samuel Gompers, Antonio Gramsci, Hannah Arendt—I'm thinking here of The Human Condition (1958)—Heidi Hartmann, Lise Vogel, Donna Haraway, and Judith Butler, as well as the more distant echoes heard in critical theory, and perhaps even the majority of people in the larger historical profession.⁴ These affiliates typically assume or argue:

1. Civil society becomes critically significant in modern Western civilization (and they get this from Hegel's Philosophy of Right [1821], pars. 182-256). Marxists are able, as a result, to claim that power, and the sources of historical change, cannot be construed as merely political or dynastic phenomena. They are also able to see that the site of self-discovery and self-government is society, not the polis, and not even, or exclusively, politics. Notice how "liberal" Marxists look from this Hegelian standpoint, and notice why modern social historians always sound vaguely Marxoid. 5

2. The labor theory of value is indispensable in explaining how the exchange of equivalents...