Why history matters for socialists
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
Why do socialists put so much emphasis on reading, discussing and writing history? There are two main reasons. The first is that, in the absence of this work, the radical movements and traditions we draw our inspiration from would be buried under the ideas about the past promoted by the ruling class and its institutions.
This was a theme of Walter Benjamin’s 1940 essay “On the Concept of History”. In the sixth thesis of the essay, he wrote, “In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it”. The tradition he’s referring to is that of working-class radicalism and socialism, and the conformism that threatens it that of various forms of ruling-class ideology.
If the past, as William Faulkner put it, isn’t really past, but continues to exist as a component of contemporary reality, then it too is subject to the rule set down by Marx in The German Ideology: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force”.
You can’t directly observe and experience history, as if it were a view from a mountain. It’s something that’s constructed in the mind out of raw material of words, images and sounds—traces of the past that are captured and preserved amid the turbulent flow of time. It is, as such, easily manipulable by those in power. They fund and control our schools, universities, museums and other institutions that do both the capturing and preserving of history and the work of constructing historical narratives out of that material and presenting them to the public.
To the extent that some awareness of history is necessary for the smooth functioning of capitalist society, the ruling class wants to ensure it will be theirversion of it that dominates. This means history will primarily be the study of great men (and until very recently it has almost exclusively been men) and their works.
Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Questions From a Worker Who Reads” refers to (and cleverly critiques) this view of the past:
Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
Popular history podcasts like “The Rest is History” present what can sound like a thorough account of past events, but their focus is almost always on the decisions and actions of a tiny layer of leading politicians, diplomats, intellectuals and artists, military generals and so on. Workers and the poor appear mostly as an undifferentiated mass, buffeted this way and that and blindly following along while history is made by those at the top.
This even applies when capitalist historians turn their attention to working-class revolutions. You may well have been taught about the Russian Revolution in school. As part of that, you were probably taught that the revolution was the product of the (nefarious) ideas and political visions of revolutionary leaders like Vladimir Lenin. According to this view, the mass of workers who made the revolution were only ever “useful idiots” for the Bolsheviks. And of course, it all ended in disaster, demonstrating (they hope you will agree) that all attempts at genuinely transformative change are doomed to fail.
Benjamin went on, in his essay, to say, “The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious”.
Anyone who has found themselves swept up in a historical narrative like that of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution will understand what Benjamin meant by “setting alight the sparks of hope in the past”. Trotsky makes us feel, as readers, as if we are somehow experiencing events as they happened, marching alongside the workers of Petrograd and sharing something of the intensity of their hopes and fears. And we learn that, far from being duped by Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, the Russian workers strode confidently onto the stage of history and became, for a period, the true masters of their destiny.
It’s important to say, too, that when Benjamin writes of “the enemy” here he’s referring to all varieties of “conformist” ideology, not just its most overtly capitalist forms like fascism. He has in mind, too, both social-democratic, reformist socialism and Stalinism—which came to dominate the world communist movement after Stalin carried out a counter-revolution in Russia in the late 1920s and ’30s and had many of those who, like Trotsky, attempted to hold fast to Marxist principles murdered (including, some have claimed, Benjamin himself).
The Stalinist economic model was that of state capitalism, not socialism. With it came all the ideological trappings of the deeply divided class society that it was. From historians, it demanded the reinstatement of the “great man” view of history in its most extreme form yet. Trotsky’s History, in fact, was in large part inspired by a desire to preserve the true story of the revolution from the obscurity into which it was falling due to the distortions being peddled by Stalin and his supporters (Trotsky wrote it soon after being expelled from Russia in 1929).
It’s not for nothing that Victor Serge, another Russian revolutionary and veteran of the early, heroic years of the Soviet state, described the late 1930s as the “midnight of the century”. With Europe threatened by fascism on one side and Stalinism on the other, the danger was that the spirit and traditions of revolutionary socialism that reached their height in the years following 1917 would be snuffed out and lost forever. Trotsky, Serge and Benjamin count among the relatively small number of socialists who were awake to the danger. And despite Stalinism emerging strengthened from World War Two and continuing to dominate the world communist movement right up to the 1990s, theirs is a historical legacy on which we can, fortunately, continue to build today.
The work of socialist history is, then, a form of “raising the dead”. At its most effective, it does this in a double sense. First, it rescues and revives the events of revolutionary movements and the lives of their participants—events and lives that would otherwise be either completely forgotten or distorted and buried under the accumulating weight of ruling-class ideology. Second, it transmits the revolutionary spirit of those events to people in the present day, providing a spark of hope that can inspire us to take up the fight against capitalism in our own time.
The best socialist historians are (frequently, probably, contrary to appearances) rabble-rousers—stirring up trouble for the ruling class among both the dead and the living. This, however, is only step one. As socialists we know that merely “stirring up trouble” isn’t enough to win change. We also need to have a good understanding of the means and ends of socialist politics—how best, in short, to wage the fight for a socialist future. And the importance of identifying what to do (and not to do) in this regard is the second main reason that the study of history is essential.
The history of our movement is the only real guide to revolutionary organising and strategy that we have. There’s been no shortage of ideas on this front. But the real test of those ideas has come in practice, and the attempt to apply the ideas without consideration of the historic practice—and the way that practice can best be applied in contemporary contexts—is among the worst, and most frequently committed, errors socialists can fall into.
Imagine, for a moment, the theory and practice of socialism to be like a martial art. To learn it requires a knowledge of the established rules, theories and techniques of fighting. That alone, however, is no guarantee of success. The construction union slogan “hardened by battle” comes to mind. Being good at fighting (whether in martial arts or in socialist politics) requires a degree of accumulated knowledge and experience of actual fights. To be truly “battle hardened” means fighting and fighting and fighting until your movements (and your capacity to predict and pre-empt those of your opponent) become like second nature.
This is one reason why the truly great revolutionary fighters of the past have been the products of periods of heightened class struggle. By the time he was 26, Trotsky was a leader of the Saint Petersburg soviet in the Russian revolution of 1905. At age 19, Rosa Luxemburg was head of the revolutionary wing of the German Social Democratic Party, the most powerful working-class organisation in the world. Most socialists, most of the time, don’t get the chance to hone their skills in the kind of intense class battles that were raging across Russia and Western Europe in those years. What we can do, however, is study them.
We can come to an understanding of the ideas and strategies socialists like Trotsky adopted in those circumstances, how they changed as the struggle progressed, what the ruling classes did in their effort to hold back the tide of revolution, and the reason, until 1917 at least, that those efforts were successful. We should try, as much as possible, to absorb the lessons of all the great battles of our movement throughout history. The 1917 Russian Revolution, Germany from 1918 to 1923, the Spanish revolution and civil war of the 1930s, Cuba in the 1950s, Chile in the early 1970s; the list could go on indefinitely.
Here in Australia, we should grapple with the history of radical movements and organisations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Communist Party. We should come to understand why it was that, just at the point when—in the context of the anti-conscription fight during World War One—the potential for revolution was greatest, the IWW was crushed and never able to revive. And why, despite the immense potential for the growth of communism in Australia in the Great Depression and World War Two years, the CPA never established itself as anything more than a tepid left flank of the Labor Party and the trade union bureaucracy that ultimately played a key part in forging the class-collaborationist Prices and Incomes Accord of the 1980s.
As the boxer Mike Tyson famously said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”, and history isn’t likely to stop laying punches on our movement any time soon. To really advance towards socialism through future class battles we need to do much more than just arm ourselves with a theory and a program. Leaving things at that is like stepping into the ring having merely memorised an instruction manual on how to fight. Fortunately, if we’re prepared to engage seriously with the work of reading, discussing and writing history, the socialist movement’s historic triumphs and defeats provide all the material we need to turn those sparks of hope in the past into a powerful fighting force for socialism today.
