PAST AND FUTURE, OR WHAT IS HISTORY FOR?

Chapter 1 – History as a Dynamic Relationship to the Past Chesneux claims that history is not a detached, disinterested intellectual pursuit. History is not an end in itself. Rather, the present needs the past with reference to the future. History is linked to the class struggle. It is never neutral, never above the battle.

Chapter 2 – History and Social Practice: In the Establishment Camp In class societies, history is one of the tools the ruling class uses to maintain its power. The state apparatus tries to control the past at the level of both political action and ideology. Through media (newspaper articles and films), through commemorations and anniversaries, which have the following features in common: the official sponsorship of an historical celebration, a mass spectacle with popular festivities, the stereotyped portrayal of a past event to fortify the ideology of the existing power structure; the occultation of the non-official aspects of the event, such as social conflicts and mass struggles. Regarding ‘first hand sources’: The historian’s territory is completely marked out by the apparatus of repression… our memory is that of the power structure which functions as a gigantic recording machine, using the official archives of government services (Tax Officers, Treasury etc.) church archives (ecclesiastical accounts), the archives of powerful private interests (trusts, big commercial firms). We know nothing of reality except what can be inferred from the information the power structure has recorded and made available. “Occulting” – the past is something inconvenient, to be gotten rid off. Contrast French accounts glorifying the war of liberation with the non-existence of accounts pertaining to the Algerian war. The real function of historiography should be to identify and describe the specific relationship between historical knowledge and the prevailing mode of production. It is not an autonomous intellectual activity moving in a kind of closed circuit.

Chapter 3 – History and Social Practice: On the Side of the People’s Struggles Social struggles are nourished by the past. (See examples, Page 27) However, care should also be taken not to ‘invent false revolutionary legends for the people’, or ‘amuse them with lyrical tales.’ (See examples, page 29).

Chapter 4 – Was Marx an Historian? Marx did not study history as an end in itself. It is rather a theory of revolution by struggle that arose from the necessities of social practice. It studies past centuries only to return better armed to the struggles of the present.

Chapter 5 – Reversing the past-present relationship Through numerous examples, Chesneux tells us how not only should the past should be used as a tool for understanding the present, but the present as a tool for understanding the past, of ‘sharpening the profile of the past’; the study of the present is always related to the study of the past.

Chapter 6 – The false assumptions of historical rhetoric Chesneux attacks certain aspects of the prevalent historical methodology.

a) The supposed distinction between ‘historical facts’ and ‘values’: Chesneux argues that historical facts are not absolute, they are perceived differently in different times and places, among different social classes and ideological currents. At the same time, they cannot be directly experienced, since they belong to the past – they can be known only by progressive approximation to a reality that is never completely attained.Precision of knowledge, i.e. making it more genuine and richer cannot be achieved through the historian’s ‘political neutrality’ or ‘objectivity’, but only through involvement in the political struggle. (Chine example – Pg. 46)

b) Primary sources and secondary sources: According to Chesneux there is no real distinction between the two. Historical materials only refract reality in terms of the concerns, the individual or collective interests, of those who collect and use them. The historian is no more neutral than the legislator, the scribe, the archivist, the writer of memoirs, the letter-writer.

c) Diachrony-synchrony: Traditional historians divide the analysis of a historical fact into a vertical series along the time dimension (Diachrony) and in a horizontal series based on the social complex to which it belongs

(synchrony), with the observer being external. Chesneux prefers to look at it as a spiral pattern (very similar to Carr) in which the observer is at the centre, inside the historical field. The spiral moves away from the observer as it recedes in time (???), but he establishes a direct relationship with each point in the past, selectively in terms of contemporary concerns. The relationship between our own time and each age of the past is of more significance than the relationship of each past age to the rest of historical time.

d) Periodisation: Chesneux criticises the historians who have made periodisation the focal point of their methodology. He says that is a mere study technique, justifiable in certain cases only. E.g., it might be useful to us to gain a better grasp of how events much further in the past could be periodised, but only if it were done in terms that are meaningful to us, since we do need to know how political situations can be suddenly reversed and how mutations occur – in the past, therefore in the present.

e) Quantification: Quantification is not an end in itself – we need to qualitatively analyse quantitative data. (Prison example, Page 50).

Chesneux goes on to criticise ‘historical rhetoric.’ He says it is both technicist and professional, and therefore exclusionary. It is intellectualist, i.e. history is regarded as a ‘discipline’, an autonomous activity of the mind. It is productivist, following the American dictum of ‘publish or perish.’ (Similar to Jenkins). Chesneux ends by drawing a link between such rhetoric and collusion with the establishment. He gives the example of the relationship between the colonial powers and the newly liberated colonised countries exercised in the field of historical studies. Finally, he says that the essential criterion of scientific knowledge remains the two-way relationship between theory and practice. And this is something that history, by definition, can achieve only through contact with the present. There should be an active relationship. (Pear-Mao example, Page 54). Since we cannot act on the past directly, we must inculcate an active relationship with the world of today, which is its culmination. It is by analysing in the first place, our living society that general principles for the study of human societies, including those of the past, can be discovered.

Chapter 7 – A sociological pocket-guide to historical knowledge (Irrelevant)

Chapter 8 – The Traps of Quadripartition in History Chesneux criticises the prevalent system of dividing history into specific phases separated by sharp chronological lines. It artificially slices up various original and homogenous areas of history, such as the history of the maritime region of the Baltic and North Seas between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries; it relegates to the background some of the most interesting phenomena, the deepest mutations and historical watersheds; (Roman example) It also interferes with the study of specific long-range phenomena such as the village community, the role of utopia, unconventional warfare, marginal social groups etc. The result is a form of real indoctrination. The historian finally convinces himself that his competence must be confined to one of the officially approved basic categories and he refrains from any attempt at general or comparative thinking.

Chapter 9 – The Historian’s Nostalgia for ‘history in the grand style.’ Chesneux criticises the historian’s temptation to develop a general discourse on world history, to present a logical, analytical view of the entire course of human development, showing how the succession of great historical periods leads inevitably to the age in which the author is privileged to live. He denounces such attempts as commercial, and also ideological (in its relevance to current problems and links between the past and the present). There are four reactions to this world-view of history:

a) Philosophy of History, or theoretical and philosophical considerations of the content and meaning of human history.

b) Historical methodology, or the analysis of the techniques of historical research.c) Comparative history, or the parallel analysis of two or three analogous cases of the same phenomenon in the past.d) Historiography, or the rational description of the successive stages of historical knowledge.

Chesneux goes on to criticise the approach of Althusser, who wants to analyse the specific structures of historicism peculiar to each mode of production’, and in further abstraction, the real aim of history is not to know what has happened in history, but how the concept o history has been produced in its most specific features.

Chapter 10 – Pre-capitalist societies: Have they a common past? Chesneux qualifies Marx’s statement that world history begins only with capitalism and the capitalist market. Up to the sixteenth century, the existence of a common history – even one deeply rooted in the past –was made impossible by the restrictions and isolation inherent in the earlier modes of production: slavery, feudalism and the ‘Asiatic’ system. Capitalism not only facilitated the emergence of such a common history, by also discovered in its underlying principles the basis for a global history propelled by certain common mechanisms. Although there was long distance travel in the pre-capitalist societies, and they did not live in isolation, sill these relations were discontinuous, partial and marginal. The empires rose and disintegrated. The adventures of the great explorers were hardly known at all and in any case soon forgotten. For such long-distance exchanges did not effect the basic economic structures whether of the Asiatic, slave or feudal type. They were not historically necessary to the reproduction of those structures. The relations, once established, could easily evaporate, slip completely into oblivion, as happened in case of the Northmen in Canada or the Chinese in Africa. Or they could simply run out of steam, mark time etc. These explorers were not impelled by the fundamental economic imperatives of their social system to penetrate, say Australia, and settle there. On the other hand, the relationship the Westerners established with Australia in the era of capitalism was irreversible, for it was based on structural necessity; capitalism’s urge towards indefinite expansion with a view to the expanded reproduction of capital. And that is what Marx meant when he said that world history begins with the world capitalist market.