The Development Of The Monist View In History

The "father of Russian Marxism", George Plekhanov (1857-1918) directed most of his writings against the Russian "populist" movement to which he once belonged. He insisted that although, in principle, in semi-feudal societies such as the Russian, the first revolution would of necessity have to be a "capitalist" one. However, he noted that bourgeoisie was too weak to bring it about and thus it fell upon the proletariat to conduct "both" revolutions. However, he condemned the methods of Lenin and the Bolsheviks soon after 1917. In books such as Socialism and the Political Struggle (1883), Our Differences (1884) and On the Development of the Monist View of History (1895), Plekhanov argued that a successful Marxist revolution could only take place after the development of capitalism. According to Plekhanov, it was the industrial proletariat who would bring about a socialist revolution. Plekhanov was strongly opposed to the political views of people who argued that it would be possible for a small group of dedicated revolutionaries to seize power from the Tsar. Plekhanov warned that if this happened, you would replace one authoritarian regime with another and that a "socialist caste" would take control who would impose a system of "patriarchal authoritarian communism.

A decade after Francis Fukuyama announced the ‘End of History’, anti-capitalist demonstrators at Seattle and elsewhere have helped reinvigorate the Left with the reply ‘another world is possible’. More than anyone else it was Marx who showed that slogans such as this were no utopian fantasies, and that capitalism was just as much a historical mode of production, no more natural and certainly no less contradictory, than were the feudal and slave modes which proceeded it. Paul Blackledge opens this study with a defence of the Marxist approach to the study of history against what he argues as being the naive empiricism of traditional historians and the relativism of the postmodernists. He moves on to outline Marx and Engels analyses of concrete historical processes and their critiques of the alternative historiographic methodologies of their contemporaries. He then discusses neglected historical works produced by Marxists in the half-century or so after Marx and Engels’ deaths. Two central chapters survey recent Marxist debates on, first, the nature of modes of productions, including slave, feudal and tributary systems, and the revolutionary transitions between them; and, second, the methodological debate over the issue of structure and agency in the movement of history. Finally, he shows the political relevance of these debates through a concluding survey of competing Marxist attempts to periodise the present, postmodern, conjuncture. This book should be read by historians, students of cultural, social and political theory and anti-capitalist activists.