In Defence of Historical Materialism
Alex Beard
Those who hasten to the barricades in defence of utopia when confronted with a critique such as Friedrich Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific tend to rather radically miss the point. This may sound perverse. It is not as though Marx and Engels were not preoccupied with dressing down those they took to be utopian ideologues – not least in an entire section of the Communist Manifesto dedicated to non-Marxian socialism – nor is it the case that they did not establish a cordon sanitaire between their post-Hegelian materialist analysis and that of earlier thinkers. Yet the incompatibility that they emphasize is not so much between Marxian socialism and utopia as it is between Marxian socialism and utopian socialism. The distinction is, as we will establish, paramount. The great Marxian innovation was to situate the social phenomenon that is detailed in The Condition of the Working Class in England, that is to say the birth of the industrial proletariat, within its historical context. The observations made in the crucible of Manchester capitalism were married to a Hegelian dialectic which had been turned by the young Marx, in the words of Engels, “on its head”. As the historical process unfolded, so too did its contradictions. The
conquest of the bourgeois subject whose revolutions heralded a new era in world history had produced in equal measure an unpropertied gargantuan: the “part of no part” which undermined bourgeois claims to universal subjecthood. Most latter-day broadsides on Marx and Engels, particularly from those who consider themselves to be on the left, emphasize their ‘historicism’. Post-structuralist and postcolonial intellectuals, particularly, express a pronounced scepticism towards the idea that there can be such thing as universal history. They claim that the conditions to which Marxian theory pertains are specific either to Europe or to the past, often both. This is to fail to abstract from the nineteenth-century literature, and indeed from subsequent applications of materialist analysis to the cultural sphere. Few could reasonably dispute that we live, now more than ever, in a world in which the relations of production (that is to say capitalism) are universal, and little else (the rights that people enjoy, the wealth that people own, the access to resources that they have) is. Capitalist production being universal, so too is the proletariat on which it relies. And since the interests of this class are diametrically opposed to those of the bourgeois
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Consciousness, Not Utopia
