Bit & Biblio

Trying on the Emperor’s Old New Clothes: Hayden White and Intellectual Abdication: A Comment

The older, Rankean historicism was relativistic insofar as it believed that understanding of a historical phenomenon required that the historian view it “in its own terms” or “for itself alone”. Here “objectivity” meant getting outside the historian’s own epoch and culture, viewing the world from its perspective, and reproducing the way the world appeared to the actors in the drama that he was recounting. The newer, absolutist branch of historicism – that of Hegel, Marx, Spengler et alia, those “scientistic” historicists castigated by Popper – claimed to transcend relativism by the importation of scientific theories into historical analysis, use of a technical terminology, and disclosure of the laws that governed the historical process over all times and places. So, too, the more modern, social-scientifically oriented historians claimed to transcend relativism by their use of rigorous method and their avoidance of the “impressionistic” techniques of their more conventional narrativist counterparts. But if my hypothesis is correct, there can be no such thing as a nonrelativistic representation of historical reality, inasmuch as every account of the past is mediated by the language mode in which the historian casts his original description of the historical field prior to any analysis, explanation, or interpretation he may offer of it.

-         Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) pp. 116-117 [added emphasis].

The portion of this passage which I have italicised amounts to “absolutist historicism”, since it is the absolutist proclamation of a principle of relativism. “There can be no such thing”, etc. The phrase following the “inasmuch” is a non sequitur. It does not follow, in other words, that because “every account of the past is mediated by the language mode in which the historian casts his original description…prior to any analysis” etc. that there can be no such thing as a nonrelativist representation. 

It is problematical and possibly dubious whether one could argue that the Rankean method is “relativistic” just because it seeks to enter into the thinking of the past. To seek to grasp how people thought and acted in eras before our own is a scientific approach towards understanding those eras. If I seek to re-imagine and re-create medieval thought in the process of writing a medieval history (a somewhat vital procedure, I would have thought, since differences between medieval thought and our own are central to any discussion from our perspective on the Middle Ages) this does not mean that I myself regard medieval values and ideas as just as good as any others or just as instrumental in plausibly gaining access to knowledge of reality. I do not use medieval methods and attitudes to search out medieval attitudes and methods, any more than did Ranke.

The passage on Hegel, Marx and Spengler (three writers with very different attitudes from one another on the nature of history) is loose, to say the least. White is not averse to flinging a fair bit of his own terminology about when describing them and their successors: (“absolutist branch of historicism”, “narrativist counterparts”, “nonrelativist representation of historical reality,” “language mode”). White is content to follow Popper in the latter’s weakest propositions without examining any of them critically. Thus Spengler is considered “scientistic”. Although Spengler certainly drew biological analogies in his discussion of civilisations and thought civilisations to exhibit the growth and the decay of vitality of a kind similar to that of organisms, he is not widely regarded as a writer who introduced scientific method to the study of history, and these allusions to biology might well be better taken as tropes in White’s sense.  It is perhaps most appropriate to look upon Decline of the West as a prose epic – that is, a work with an epic vision - suffused in an eclectic moralism and in poetical-metaphorical turns of phrase. It can still be read with profit in the sense of being a visionary work and as a document of the early 20^th century in the aftermath of the German defeat in World War I. But Spengler is inaptly (ineptly?) chosen by White for a discussion centred on the history discipline, inapt because Spengler has never held much sway over historians who denigrated him from the start and have never much altered their views. Spengler – because he is essentially a poetic visionary and moralist – appealed much more to poets, novelists and dramatists both in his day and thereafter. (For example posthumously Spengler was an important influence at one time on William S. Burroughs in the latter’s implicit and explicit critiques of Western society.)  Spengler is a contemporaneous non-fiction counterpart of Thomas Mann, the novelist of the epic tragedy of European bourgeois decline. He was never considered by the historical profession taken as a whole as introducing “scientific method” to the study of history, in the sense of the careful and objective weighing up of evidence according to theoretical hypotheses.  Any such “science” as Spengler might have been thought to introduce was always considered negligible and dubious. So far as I am aware, this view has never changed. And with regard to the present discussion, it is the impact of Spengler on the profession which is the moot point.

White is careful to delineate “historicists” rather than “historians” when naming the three. Since later in the passage he refers to the “more modern, social-scientifically oriented historians” in connection with the earlier three, it is difficult to work out whether White’s passage is on “historicism” (probably meant as a philosophical approach to history) or on the practice of actual historians. There is no necessary connection between the two. Hegel and Spengler in particular have certainly wielded great influence in their respective times, but it would be stretching things to say that this influence was much felt on the practice of history in the Anglo-Saxon world, at any rate. And it was the practice of Ranke (not necessarily the romantic and nationalist beliefs sustaining it) that was probably more influential than any other on 19^th-century historians taken as a whole. We cannot surely be discussing Hegel, Spengler and even Marx as historical practitioners per se, and in terms of their influence on other historians in this light. White has been criticised elsewhere for citing rather few actual historians in his writings on history – and those mainly of a 19^th-century positivist school not much in fashion amongst contemporary historians for many years. Even in this passage he cites “more modern, social-scientifically oriented historians” without managing to name any.

Of the three, Spengler might, however, lay the best claim to being an historian since his thought is far too eclectic for him to be considered “philosophical” - at any rate to qualify him for membership within the mainstream of philosophy per se. Hegel was not a historian so much as a philosopher who used his view of history necessarily to corroborate a dialectical system and in the process contributed to the philosophy of history as well. I doubt if any reader - historian or student or layperson - has ever read Hegel’s Philosophy of History in search of a working historical knowledge of, say, ancient Greece and Rome, let alone ancient China or India. The writings on history in the work of Hegel, growing out of his historicist logic of process, describe by concrete reference the progress of the Absolute Idea which will reach its fruition and culmination in the greatness of the Prussian state. White in referring to Hegel as some sort of historian – albeit “historicist” - who contributed to the common practice of writing history (a highly dubious proposition in itself) is misleading in the sense of turning his own argument about historians essentially on examples who are not historians – that is, in the sense of having carried out any original research in the gathering and interpreting of historical evidence – something that even Herodotus and Thucydides long ago attempted or insisted they had attempted in their own way to do, which is precisely why we consider the two Greeks to have been the joint fathers of history, as opposed to those who composed heroic epics. Had they not each insisted on the veracity of their stories because they themselves had sought out evidence for them, we today would look upon them both as no more than great storytellers. Thucydides, indeed, considered his predecessor Herodotus deficient in this matter, and so referred to him as more the “father of lies” than the “father of history”. So they were both self-described historians - that is, however suspect or tainted their evidence might have been by modern standards of evidence gathering and corroboration. Both Hegel and Spengler in their different ways derive or justify the truth of their respective studies of history either by a form of philosophical-logical discussion or a semi-poetic, rhetorical and in Spengler’s case even a passionate, emotive appeal. They do not, as have historians since long before the time of Ranke, sought to justify their work principally on grounds of the evidence either actually or apparently gathered to support it, but principally on the grounds of their arguments and philosophies, decked out as they are by historical reference. This would seem to me to be the prima facie case for a loose but enduring definition of historians in general (that is, in marking them off from other kinds of writer) – we can then go on to argue over to what extent historians over the past two thousand years have actually drawn from evidence or whether a strictly empirical attitude with or without compelling logical argument on its behalf is the “best” way of - not simply thinking about history - but writing it. But that is another argument altogether, and the hauling in of Hegel and of Spengler does nothing to forward enlightening discussion on this continuing controversy.

          Whether or not Marx was a “historicist” is something to be considered below, but there would certainly be slim justification for introducing him here pre-eminently as a historian, if that is the import of White’s passage. It is true that he wrote detailed accounts of events occurring in France virtually at the time they occurred, or only shortly after, and in which he was himself involved to some extent in the political sense, though exiled abroad. The 18^th Brumaire and Civil War in France are as close to strictly “historical” writing as Marx ever got, and historians have not found them particularly “scientistic” or theory-laden, as it were, whatever their political bias. Yet even they seem to be more like in-depth, analytical journalism, such as is practiced by investigative (and radical!) journalists today – as indeed were his and Engels’ various pieces for the New York Tribune and other newspapers of the time, on the American Civil War and other contemporary subjects. Engels did rather more “distant” historical analysis, with The Peasant War in Germany and other writings, than did Marx himself.

There is perpetual confusion as to Marx’s approach to history, something that he did not much help to dissipate, that is, if he was ever aware that such a confusion might arise. On the one hand, he seems to put forward a distinct theory of all history, or so it appears to some readers from the singular and slim evidence of the 1859 Preface. On the other hand, we see (if we read the book that the Preface was a preface of) that what Marx was engaged on was a detailed and intricate study of capital, that which he and Engels considered the dominant historical force of their time. Because his dialectical approach to capitalism eschewed ahistorical model-building, that much beloved of the econometric writers of our time, that is, because it is by definition static and non-dialectical, Marx places the development of the capital power relation in society within the context of history and, especially in Capital I, draws from recent examples within history to corroborate his own findings and structural analyses. Nor did he have much use for those who simply extrapolated from “the facts” of outward appearances to adduce either history or theory. As he wrote on a number of occasions, inspired by a saying of Heraclitus, science would be unnecessary if outward appearances corresponded to inner processes of development. To get to the latter one requires “the power of abstraction”, which is a perfectly sound scientific methodology, pioneered by Galileo, Newton and Clerk-Maxwell and used in mathematical applications and in countless computer-enhanced studies long after Marx’s time. Marx was analysing a synchronic/diachronic historico-structural phenomenon, not a sequence of events. He certainly believed depth analysis of such a phenomenon would aid us in understanding the events (“outward appearances”), and that is a proposition most analysts of any kind, notably of the Stock Market, would be loath to gainsay. But he did not apply this particular analysis to the whole of history, and so did not supply an all-encompassing “scientistic” theory of history. Indeed he expressed contempt for any such “super-historical” theories, scornfully so in 1877. I suggest that the sketch of history outlined in the 1859 Preface is in fact a coded means of getting round the Prussian censor by a generalisation of what Marx was essentially concerned with:  a transition into, and later out of, the dominance of the capital relation.

Hayden White has fallen into the conventional bourgeois view of Marx as having propounded a “scientistic” view of history taken as a whole. But evidence for this is not to be found in Marx’s writings. Historical materialism taken as a whole is as empirical an approach to history in general as any other; more so to the extent that it removes the study of history from metaphysically derived comprehensive paradigms, in stating its grounding in the materialism of man-in-nature. In other words, history, the study of mankind on the earth, is an aspect of natural history, the history of the earth. Class struggle within advanced cultures is an indication of the pressure of natural needs on human beings that are present everywhere and at all times, as materially situated human “thinking” animals within necessarily exploitative social cultures. Historical materialists might be described by antagonists with a plausibility agreeable to their followers as “absolutists” in suggesting that the alternatives to a materialist historical approach must inevitably be metaphysically derived; even the one-damned-thing-after-another approach is metaphysical in insisting that the scheme of things is ultimately worked out at random: it is itself an abstract proposition. It would be possible to locate White himself within a disquisition on the metaphysics of an all-pervading language use.

All of these are various forms of idealism, and it is historical idealism that is the adversary of historical materialism. Kolakowski is therefore quite mistaken in suggesting that historical materialism is perhaps – or probably - no more than trivially true. One thing is certain: the critics cannot have it both ways! Only by intellectual contortions can they tack towards a “trivially true” critique after having realised that historical materialism does not embody a metaphysic but is anti-metaphysical at its roots, which leaves them with little to criticise without falling back on the opposite contention that historical materialism is anyhow only a trivially commonsense means of approaching history. We fail to grasp Marx’s true import as a thinker when we fail to grasp just how pervasive metaphysics is, in historical study as elsewhere, no less so in our own times than previously - in forms it was not once upon a time concerned to obscure.

All this forms Marx’s legacy in regard to historical study, but simply to refer to Marx as a particular type of historian is to miss the point about that legacy. Marx’s study of capital is the intellectual appropriation and grasp of a totalising mechanism that transforms concrete history. Capital is the basis for historical materialism because capital is itself the totality as every process and transaction (even in terms of relations with nature) becomes, over time, commodified – intensively so in our own time. Capital accumulation is the determinist factor, not the Marxist analysis of it. Indeed only such an analysis can help lead the way out of cAContinuing to be in thrall to this determinism. The totality is the concrete and dynamic phenomenon, not the metaphysical construct. In any other sense, “history” is not only a vapid but also a metaphysical concept. In these terms can historical materialism be viewed as an empirical approach to history, because it simply has no pre-conceived metaphysical construction for the whole of it. In studying history, therefore, we must apply ourselves to the evidence rigorously (as Engels was constantly beseeching Marxists to do, and which Marxist historians have more or less always done) and analyse strictly from what we find, viewed in the light of the most intense intellectual ratiocination. The closest Marx and Engels got to a theoretical approach to the whole of history was their characterisation of “the materialist conception of history” as adumbrated in the unfinished German Ideology and referred to in the 1859 Preface, though in the latter Marx is careful to describe this as his “guiding thread” rather than as a theory – what one might call, perhaps, an hypothesis only. But this early “philosophical” approach was eschewed (though its lessons not forgotten) by the two in favour of more detailed, empirical work, which they came to realise was the only alternative to the grand philosophical analysis that they were in the process of giving up, in their “settling of accounts” with historico-philosophical accounts in general. This empirical approach necessarily led Marx to identify phenomena – that is, a specific phenomenon - within history rather than narrativise the whole of history as such. The “grand narratives” much berated by postmodernists must be sought elsewhere. Marxists and others follow the Marxian legacy best in their pursuit of history by identifying dialectical-historical concrete, totalising phenomena rather than by mapping out a whole “materialist metaphysic” of history, as is the tendency of the epigones.  Popular expositions of historical materialism are prone to this tendency.

We then come to the “more modern, social-scientifically oriented historians”, unnamed. These “claimed to transcend relativism by their use of rigorous method and their avoidance of the ‘impressionistic’ techniques of their more conventional narrativist counterparts”.  But if White’s hypothesis is correct, this highly varied assortment of historians cannot surmount relativism because they are – in effect – imprisoned in the very language they use from doing so, a language use that pre-dates “any analysis, explanation or interpretation” that may be offered.

          White seems to think that “language” is all that these historians use. Economic historians, of course, have recourse to statistics also, which they derive from all manner of sources and stack up in all kinds of ways, by means of graphs, charts, pies and so on. They also have recourse to econometric models that are expressed in the language of algebra. And certain texts will rely quite a lot on illustrative material taken from (say) old books, drawings and sketches, not to speak of photographs, as well as film and audio sources. Not to speak of historians who have drawn upon archaeological artefacts. Certain historians do rely on a “language mode” but it may not be their own: that is, if it is verbally derived from interviews utilised in oral history.  If historians were mere grand essayists (in the 18^th-century manner, perhaps) none of this non-literary material would be considered as anything other than extraneous to history, but the merest glance into any advanced textbook will show that it is intrinsic, not extraneous. 

          It is true that certain historians have a narrative flair and an eye for the drama of their subject matter. But for every one of these there is at least another whose history is of what one might call the driest, an accumulation of detailed evidence in vast profusion: the kind of historical text one tends to “consult” rather than read cover-to-cover with anything like avidity. I would like to see what White makes of detailed descriptions of early modern land tenure in southern England, for example, or an econometric analysis of the Great Depression. It is quite possible that a “language mode” of some kind is getting in the way, but in this instance not of the expression of historical evidence but of any ordinary reader’s enjoyment and assimilation of it. There is the type of economic historical writing that is tortuous because the writer would vastly prefer to present his material in elegant and clear equations rather than in prose: prose as the conveyor of quantifying statistical analysis can in some hands become clumsy, interminable and in some instances self-contradictory: one can almost sense the writer following the figures as he writes – and the result, in prose, is scarcely coherent. Far from the language mode being in control of the process, it is quite clear in these instances that the grip of the language mode is slipping. Yes, there are very great problems with language in historical presentation, but they are to do with the delivery of insights and evidence to make meaningful sentences. But to equate the meaningful with the poetic, the subjective and the relativist is to consign meaning and the need for it to the fictitious altogether. What is proposed equates to a closed circle (or negative feedback) of our own voices rebounding on ourselves.

If White had looked into his Popper further, he might have discovered the theory of unfalsifiability, which tells us that a theory lies within science if it can be falsified. If it cannot be falsified, then although it may be an interesting theory, it is not science. Which means that it is either a matter of belief, or of taste, or of speculative interest but with little foundation in material reality. The postmodernist disquisition on “the language mode” in White’s terminology, or “the linguistic turn” in Rorty’s is unfalsifiable. There is no means by which any of White’s contentions may be disproven or falsified. Not even this entire article can do the trick, because it can always be argued that I am in thrall to “the language mode” in which I have phrased my arguments. I can appear to refute things, and I can even claim the whole postmodernist stance is based on a deeply rooted logical contradiction; this does not matter because all I am doing is spouting rhetoric with appropriate tropes. This leaves the postmodernists immune, themselves, to the charge of spouting rhetoric because – they could easily claim – “rhetoric” is all there is anyhow. This is the Sophist outlook that so concerned Socrates/Plato to refute, but like them it partakes of the selfsame idealism. That is because it seeks to dress up the evident Sophistry of “everything is words” in the fancy clothes of a philosophical relativism. But, as already intimated, if relativism is the ultimate absolute, we have reached the final contradiction in the whole contention. I shall put Lukacs forward to cast this in the historical dimension, that is, of the intertwining of the thought process at work with that of concrete history of bourgeois development:

In other words, intellectual genesis must be identical in principle with historical genesis. We have followed the course of the history of ideas which, as bourgeois thought has developed, has tended more and more to wrench these two principles apart. We were able to show that as a result of this duality in method, reality disintegrates into a multitude of irrational facts and over these a network of purely formal ‘laws’ emptied of content is then cast. And by devising an ‘epistemology’ that can go beyond the abstract form of the immediately given world (and its conceivability) the structure is made permanent and acquires a justification – not inconsistently – as being the necessary ‘precondition of the possibility’ of this world view. But unable to turn this ‘critical’ movement in the direction of a true creation of the object – in this case of the thinking subject – and indeed by taking the very opposite direction, this ‘critical’ attempt to bring the analysis of reality to its logical conclusion ends by returning to the same immediacy that faces the ordinary man of bourgeois society in his everyday life. It has been conceptualised, but only immediately. [1]

Lukacs’ description of bourgeois thought processes as entering a degeneration because of the historical situation of the bourgeoisie is perfectly captured by postmodernism, if we characterise it, in the manner of Fredric Jameson, as an expression of “late capitalism”. The system has nowhere to go but towards its own enfolding in social and planetary catastrophe. The intellectual cupboard is bare, yet intellectuals feast on a future like everybody else.  It becomes increasingly impossible – as the intellectuals are the first to spot (Lukacs got there in 1923) - to link up the creation to the creative subject since the latter’s embodiment in the bourgeois ascendancy leads to no future that is anything other than spiralling downwards in all manner of ways. Businessmen may still reap opportunities from this even at such a late hour, but for intellectuals there is not much to grasp hold of. One must give credit to those who, like Hayden White, have made the best of the situation intellectually speaking (and may well have derived affluent careers from the process) but the fact that White has been given such credence as he has received throughout the academic world, and considering that I am moved to make such refutation as I have just delivered, whatever its merit or lack of, suggests that the rot has well and truly set in.

---

[1] Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics [1923] transl. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971) 155. Emphasis in the original.

The Biter Bit

          In this the closing article in these sections, it seems fitting – for reasons I shall make clear - that I should be critically examined after having picked quarrels elsewhere, whether by others or at least initially by myself.  

          The preceding essays have been written over a few years, up to the present. With one exception they were never published as it was always my intention to publish them together if I could, but the blog will serve just as well and might even bring in more readers than print would. I have added new ones for that purpose. Over the period I have evolved views with which I have become more or less satisfied, which is always a dangerous condition to be in.

          For example, in ‘What Is Total Revolt?’ I appeared to assert that Marx believed a working-class revolution was imminent. This assertion is only half-true, despite (or perhaps is belied by) the fact that Marx and Engels remained active revolutionaries all their adult lives. [1] In 1847 they viewed European revolution as imminent and they were correct, for in the following year revolutions broke out, and especially in France the proletariat was at the forefront of the struggle. However the revolutions lost out or lost their way one way or another; gradually in country after country the old regimes returned to power or new authoritarian ones came to power. Marx – ending up in what turned out to be permanent political exile in England – had by 1850 to revaluate the possibility of imminent revolution, and this sober view was confirmed by the ebbing of the revolutionary tide everywhere in the subsequent decade, though the Paris Commune of 1871, on which Marx is perhaps its most perspicacious commentator, certainly provided some grounds for not consigning the dictatorship of the proletariat motif to total fantasy even if the Commune itself was not a purely proletarian uprising. Compounding my error, I then wrote: “Though an admirable predictor in many respects, Marx was entirely wrong; not just a little wrong but entirely wrong.

The whole richness of subsequent Marxist apologetics, historiography, interpretation and exegesis rests on this one, big towering mistake and delusion – which looks more like an absurdity to the total rebel the closer he examines it: as if working classes could ever rise up to destroy and expropriate, when unemployment and bad times lead to worker subjugation and impotence, whilst full employment and good times lead to workers striking only for better wages to climb on the gravy train along with everybody else. This is not to gainsay a fundamental proposition that different classes exist, exist mainly in conflict, and that for various reasons one class may well supersede another in time – not in itself an exclusively “Marxist” view, as Marx himself was the first to point out.

I did not made it sufficiently clear that I am in fact characterising a view of the Marxian project as might be put forward by the hypothetical “total rebel” who is the subject of that essay, but that does not absolve me because in a sense it is I who am hiding behind it. In the next paragraph I backtrack:

Of course as a Marxist I regard this argument critiquing Marx as requiring unpicking (for example I would urge closer scrutiny into Marx’s theoretical justifications for capitalism as an intrinsically self-destructing phenomenon-totality with all that this implies for social revolutionary fallout as being inevitable) and I’d want to add that the jury is still out on proletarian revolution as such: but I do not necessarily help a theory simply by postponing its culmination in reality to some indefinite time in the future. The same postponement, as I said, became the fate of Christian eschatology. And if one says that only conscious revolutionary praxis will bring on the revolution, this leads to a delusive voluntarism if such praxis does not become embraced by the majority of the working class. I say that is still possible – that is, on a global scale and in relation to the exigencies and crises of capitalism. It is still possible; but then, anything is possible. But this is, of course, to take a passive observer’s view rather than that of the potential or actual participant and fomenter with urgent needs and perceptions to match. [2]

Taken together, this is not exactly an incisive performance, though good in parts. Apart from failings in authorship, it may reflect an ambivalence of perspective that has roots in my petty bourgeois antecedents, but I am sure you’d want my biography kept out of this. Rather than cut the passage out I have left it in as an example of the kind of wandering focus and fuzzy reasoning of which I have accused some of my ambushed victims. As Joe E Brown said, nobody’s perfect, though critics like me might have reason to seek less refuge in that excuse than those who do not take it upon themselves to criticise others.

           Throughout this website I have stressed the centrality in historical materialism of science as the human praxis of mastery within the dialectical totality of the subject-object of humankind’s relations with nature, which extends both to an instrumental grasp of nature herself within the dialectic and to a scientific socialism engaged in the praxis of mastery over class struggle, itself a further development in the relations between humanity and nature since class struggle is fought out on the basis of human material or “natural” needs and the denial of the satisfaction of those needs to the many, fought against on the basis of demanding recompense, fairness or justice, and in some instances liberty and self determination.

Coercive class-bound society (which is what ”coercive” society is), itself representing a material advance over hunter-gathering if with  drawbacks, is thus the later stage in the sustaining of survival and the achievement of the fulfilment of expanding need within the subject-object, man-nature dialectic. Later still, this struggle enters an ecological phase or dimension as coercive capitalism asserts its dominance at the expense of the future of all life on the planet. Scientific socialism has to respond by relating the class struggle, the struggle of class against class within systems of modes of production which are necessarily exploitative, to the widening of this struggle into one for human survival together with the planetary life out of which humankind evolved. Saving the earth has necessarily to be carried out through democratic socialism because, left to the devices of a class-bound society and with the intensification of the ecological crisis, the dominant class will endeavour to save itself and its support systems first and the rest of the world – and the masses – a distant second, if at all.  This will amount eventually to ecological catastrophe of the planet anyhow by a particular route, not the saving of it.

          However, the passages I have just quoted from the “Revolt” essay exemplify  an inconsistency on my part in the maintaining of this overall argument, and this was brought home to me by my reading of Bahman Azad’s article ‘The Scientific Basis of the Concept of the Vanguard Party of the Proletariat’. [3] This in turn led me back to Lenin’s What Is to be Done?  (1902). [4]

          I cannot and should not summarize the whole of Azad’s valuable (and for me corrective) article here, but it is important that I draw from it the salient arguments relevant to the points I have made and wish to make, starting (as the King of Hearts would have advised) from the beginning of the piece:

The scientific character of Marx and Engels’s materialist conception of history was based on their premise that a dialectical correspondence exists between the material processes of nature and the process of the historical development of human society. In other words, the epistemological foundation of historical materialism – that is, its claim to the scientific character of its concepts – is based on the argument that both nature and history obey the same dialectical laws of motion and change, and that they can be apprehended by the human mind.

Incidentally, this states in some ways rather better what I was attempting to formulate about the dialectical materialist conception of history in my polemic ‘Paul Mason and Armageddon’, above. Provided one recognises that “laws” is a metaphor for self-generating processes whose nature and interrelations we come to understand as necessary and recurrent, not edicts handed down by a higher Power of some sort. I was defending materialist dialectics against wave-theory on this basis. But to return to Azad’s train of thought:

In respect of Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, Azad re-states the fundamental proposition of historical materialism or scientific socialism as that “the laws of dialectics are immanent in all objective reality, including natural, social and cognitive processes.” [5]

          Azad goes on to summarize the historical fate of this concept within the Marxist movement. (Indeed, what happens in politics when a metaphor lunges out of control.)  During the period of the Second International (1889-1914), the “dialectics of nature” concept was appropriated by such as Kautsky, Hilferding and Bernstein to suggest that if the coming of social revolution was embedded in a “natural” law (like, say, the Second Law of Thermodynamics) then it was inevitable, and if it was inevitable then no special effort on the part of the workers’ movement was required to bring it on. [6] This lapse in the effective abandonment of the – concrete as opposed to idealist - dialectic as stated by Marx and Engels (and re-stated by Lenin after them) left the Marxist party free to pursue everyday reformist political goals in the full if false confidence that the revolution would arrive with the inevitability of the annual flooding of the Nile or the onset of the monsoon season in India. The dominant reformism within German Marxism received a fatal body-blow with the mass renunciation of international socialism in August 1914 when the mainstream socialist parties lined up behind the various bourgeois governments of rival great powers and the masses under them went off to kill each other in opposing national armies in the grossest and most tragic human slaughter seen to that time in the history of modern warfare.

          With the revival of revolutionary Marxist-socialist fortunes in the victory of the October Revolution and in the central European revolutionary atmosphere after the ending of the World War, the now-discredited reformism of Kautsky and company was blamed not on the selfsame epigones but on Engels’ formulations (as found in Anti-Duhring – Dialectics of Nature was not published until the 1920s). There came about a “back to Hegel” movement in Western Marxism to revive Marxian dialectics but in a form closer to that of Hegel than to the materialist dialectic of Marx and Engels. Azad: “the Hegelian Marxists considered the very notion of dialectics of nature as the source of all determinism and reformism of the leaders of the Second International”. Three important theorists in this regard were Lukacs, Gramsci and Korsch, and the seminal work of the period was Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness of 1923. For Lukacs, a deep student of Hegel both before and after his espousal of revolutionary Marxism, the proletariat became both the subject and object of history, the “totality” that was historically determined in a manner remarkably close to the progressive advance of Hegel’s Absolute Mind. It was Lukacs who stated “that the dialectical method must be limited to the realm of history and society” and that Engels had been mistaken in extending it to apply also to nature. [7] As Azad summarises the argument:

[T]he proletariat, as the total subject-object of history, became the one element that unified science with history. A scientific understanding of reality could only be possible through the identity of the subject and object in the being of the proletariat…The scientific character of Marxism [according to Hegelian Marxism] is not based on the development of theories through the utilization of its scientific method, but on the consciousness of the proletariat as the historical subject…This is true not only for Lukacs, but also for Gramsci. [8]

According to Gramsci, “The measure of [Marxism’s] scientific character is not its ‘method’, but its appeal to the revolutionary classes. The more it is able to mobilize the masses behind it, the more an ideology is proven to be ‘objective.’ …[9] In this manner, Gramsci’s denial of the existence of any reality beyond the immediate needs and activities of the proletariat leaves him with no choice but to ground the objectivity of science upon a historical teleology. The objectively real thus becomes a historical goal for the subject to be attained only in communist society.” [10] Thus:

[S]cience, which Marx considered to be a product of the mutual interaction between human beings and nature through productive labor, was transformed into the ideology of various classes in struggle. Such a move, of course, was not simply a rejection of interpretations of Marx by Engels and Lenin, but of Marx’s own dialectical concepts as well – a rejection that is not without its own contradictions. [11]

Gramsci and Lukacs have departed considerably from Marx, Gramsci if anything even more than Lukacs:

By identifying “objectivity” with “unanimity”, Gramsci is in effect saying that science is only possible under communism. But he is unable to demonstrate how the proletariat…is capable of developing any socialist consciousness…under the contradictory capitalist relations of production. In other words, he is unable to account for Marxism itself. The best he can do is to attribute the communist consciousness of the vanguard to its being “ahead of its time”.

          Thus with Gramsci the proletariat is trapped in a vicious circle. It cannot achieve objectivity until it is unified through the establishment of communism, and it cannot establish communism unless it objectively fights for it through its political class struggle. …This of course, is contrary to Marx’s conception of science. For Marx, the objectivity of science is based both on the separation and the dialectical unity of subject and object. In fact, the very possibility of science is based on this separation. According to him, “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.” [12]

By having made the proletariat the simultaneous subject and object of history and society, Lukacs – and by implication Gramsci – have ignored the Marxian understanding of the proletariat as being the underclass thrown up by capitalism: an aspect, indeed, of capitalism as that which contributes its surplus value. The very trade union movement which exists to defend workers from the most excessive exploitation is in effect an adjusting mechanism for the smoother running of capitalism especially in periods of high profits which could be shared out, not a trajectory for overthrowing the system. [13] The proletariat left to its own devices is in a disadvantaged position to entirely comprehend the whole mechanism of exploitation (that is, to grasp such exploitation as a universal system of production relations geared to profit rather than use – galvanized, dialectically, by its internally competitive anarchy – a system of social control and capitalist profit: the lineaments of which  the ruling class, directly engaged in internal competition, social control, forward planning and accumulation, has a keener awareness) or to forge all the political tools needed to overturn it, that is, without making crucial class alliances. The underclass of capitalist societies on its own is by no means the supreme subject-object of history.  Indeed the point of socialist revolution is to overthrow all classes, which includes the supersession of proletarianisation itself (after a period of “dictatorship of the proletariat”, which is really a phase in its dismantling). Historically, we might note that one major reason for the decline of Chartism, the first mass working-class political movement in Western history, lay in the failure of the leadership of the movement to forge vital links with political elements in the disaffected lower and middle middle classes. As Chartism spurned such co-operation in the name of class solidarity, it isolated itself from the spectrum of radical politics in Britain at the time, despite the fact that middle-class participation was and had to be a key factor in revolutionary developments throughout Europe in the 1840s, and would always have to be so. Middle classes feel the pinch in their own way. Intellectuals either in the middle class or attaining middle-class status are generally if by no means the only ones able with some degree of learning and some leisure at their disposal to combat the “ruling ideas” of the ruling class by means of analysis, deconstructing, and the posing of alternatives. As Lenin points out, Marx, Engels and other thinkers who gave scientific socialism to the world were themselves mainly middle-class in origin (as indeed was Lenin himself).  Nor should we neglect the role funding from monies accessible only to middle-class elements has to play in researching the critiques; Marx was subsidised for much of his life by the cotton profits from Engels’ family firm in Manchester.

          A socialist supersession of capitalism differs in scope and kind from the supersession by one previous mode of production of another, as in the supersession of feudalism by capitalism, in that, on a mass basis, a deliberate and consciously-wrought overthrow is necessary if the socialist supersession is to “take”. This is because socialism from the start is about more than a new form of production relations: it involves a revaluation of “value” itself as well as deliberately worked-out and implemented democratic political forms or it could revert to tyranny: and there is an impact of all this on the creation of a richer and more fulfilled life for all. [14] Industrial capitalism emerged piecemeal as a new economic system as much by continual and innumerable “non-political” transactions as by political fiat and upheaval: in fact there was something of a time lag whether in England, France, Germany or Russia between the establishment of the “accomplished fact” of economic capitalism and its political installation (a rather brief installation in Russia unless one accepts the “state capitalist” thesis as one accurately describing Russia under seventy years of Bolshevism).

As Lenin makes clear in What Is to be Done? (Kiernan:)  “To nurture the ideal of the possibility of a ‘spontaneous’ socialist consciousness among the proletariat is tantamount to advocating the existence of an unmediated and direct relationship between the thinking and being of the working class. This, of course, is against the principles of materialist dialectics.” [15] What steps into the breech is the vanguard party. Gramsci points also to the vanguard party, but as being “ahead of its time”. But it is no such thing. It must be a part of the times itself or it has no active role. The vanguard party propagandises, agitates, educates and learns, just as a teacher learns (or ought to learn) from his or her students. The role of the vanguard party is not unlike that of the teacher, not in a hierarchical or classroom-power sense but in the sense that the art of teaching consists in listening as much as talking and learning as much as teaching. Education, like revolutionary politics, is a two-way reciprocation, not (in good and meaningful education) instruction by rote and by regimentation. Students are there to learn something from the teacher, otherwise the teaching would not be worth the cost of the tuition. But the teacher has to learn from the students both to improve teaching methods and to be open to criticism and to fresh and novel insights into the subject from the students that years of immersion in the academic authorities will otherwise isolate the teacher from. That students lack extensive knowledge of the subject does not mean they are stupid or intellectually inert, and indeed some innocence in regard to “extensive knowledge of the subject” is a medium for tackling that subject in an original and, hopefully, increasingly informed way. But these virtues are not to be overstated or else learning in order to do better in future is devalued. Students, like workers, are (in education) the subordinate group ideologically speaking. In education, also, there is a point at which the subject-matter being taught optimally ceases to be external to the student (something that has to be swotted up) and becomes internalised (the student is at some point inspired to grasp the very core or kernel of the whole subject, and to take it into himself or herself and turn it into a personal instrument rather than its remaining an outside authority).

Since there can be no question of an independent ideology being worked out by the working masses in the very process of their movement…then the only question is this: the bourgeois ideology or the Socialist ideology. There is nothing in between (for humanity has not worked out any “third” ideology and, in general, in a society torn by class contradictions, there can never be an ideology that is outside or above classes). Hence, any belittling of the Socialist ideology, any withdrawing from it, means by the same token the strengthening of the bourgeois ideology. They talk of spontaneity, but the spontaneous development of the labour movement leads precisely to its subordination to the bourgeois ideology…because a spontaneous labour movement is trade unionism…and trade unionism means precisely ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. [16]

The true meaning of “praxis” is theory and practice, but theory by definition is not spontaneously generated: to be theory in proper relation to practice it has to be consciously, sometimes painfully, worked out. The spontaneous eruptions of masses are very much the phenomena of much theoretical understanding but are not in themselves theoretically derived. Legitimate theory, as I comprehend it, is as a guide to practice, just as practice is the engine and purpose of theory. And it widens the scope of the practice as the totality of the oppression is grasped by minds.

          I have already written of the explosive academic production in recent times of “theory” (with suitably scary quotation marks) that by its existence vitiates practice because it has become a substitute for it, in the form of “interdisciplinary” postmodernism. “Theory” of this sort has come to the rescue of degenerating social sciences by substituting itself for anything in them that might have been called “practice”. It has moved in on literary criticism by way of substituting itself for the practice of appreciating, studying and evaluating literature. It has attempted to move in on drama by substituting “performance theory” for drama practice and aesthetic-dramaturgical understanding and interpretation. It attempts to undermine the basis for historiographical debate on issues in history by substituting “critical theory of history” (sometimes called “reflective history”) for the practices of history. In this sense postmodernists are not unlike the political commissars of Stalin who operated alongside the officers and field commanders of the Red Army in World War Two, in a parallel hierarchy contributing nothing to military effort or strategy but imposing the “party line” at all levels of command and weeding out suspected deviationists regardless of circumstances, advances, retreats and so on – even regardless of the survival of Russia herself against Nazi Germany – a travesty of the concept of vanguard party as enunciated dialectically by Lenin. [17]

          Speaking of which, critics will suggest that my description of postmodernism applies equally to Marxism in its subsumption of all disciplines and categories to Marxist or historical materialist dialectics. This will be true if the “Marxism” concerned is nothing more than the dogmatic application of shibboleths. But the very nature and derivation of materialist dialectics is in fact rooted in the prioritisation of empirical study: the subjects tackled by Marxists must be recognisable as the subjects they were before the Marxists got hold of them. Moreover, Marxism has no need or wish to substitute itself for scientific and cultural study since its agenda lies in the creation of a socialism in which science and culture will be given free rein without the shackles of dependence, with ideological implications, upon the largesse of capitalist markets, institutions and governments. The interdisciplinary movement towards a science of man will be accomplished on the basis of a transformation of alienated into socialist society, not on the basis of the imposition of postmodernist persiflage within existing alienated society.

          If nothing else, Azad has helped me to understand why Gramsci in particular is postmodernism’s favourite Marxist, with his substitution of class triumph for the theoretical aspect of praxis and for the comprehending of scientific truth. Leave out the revolutionary politics of Gramsci and one has in essence an intellectual relativism that even the late Richard Rorty would admire. “Truth is whatever the masses by their triumph in action embody” can easily be turned into “truth is whatever we think it is” and, finally, “by that token, there can be no objective truth as such.”  Except such “truth” as is laid down by the Party representing the masses. Azad doesn’t say this, but Gramsci has presaged the practice of Stalinism within the Communist Parties from the late 1920s onwards. The Stalin-enforced fraudulent 1930s biology known as Lysenkoism, for example, exemplifies upholding “the truth as what we – or the Great Leader – think it is”. Gramsci theoretically is where Stalinism and postmodernism come to join together.

          Apart from Lukacs, Gramsci and Korsch, there have been other formidable expositors of the view that dialectics is relevant only to human social practice and not to nature. [18] The classic exposition of this view is Alfred Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx (London, 1971), in which, for example, we find the following passage:

Before the existence of human societies, nature could only achieve polarities and oppositions of moments external to each other; at best interactions, but not dialectical contradictions. (60)

But what aspects of nature are to be considered outside the dialectical laws as characterised by Engels and both cited and approved by Marx himself? As the geneticist Richard Lewontin points out: “The first rule of the real relation between organisms and environment is that environments do not exist in the absence of organisms but are constructed by them out of bits and pieces of the external world. The second rule is that the environment of organisms is constantly being remade during the life of those living beings.” [19] Unless “organism” and “environment” are posed as dialectical oppositions inherently contradicting yet dynamically related to one another, our understanding of their real, concrete interaction will be severely vitiated. The objections I have to the Schmidt passage (and book) are (a) “priorities and oppositions” is a mealy-mouthed way of getting round dialectical opposition: for example that of organism-environment necessarily opposed yet also of one another, and (b that nowhere does it indicate how the “before” in that passage turned into the “after”, as nature and society thus became integral to one another on this planet. There is no account for just how human society as we know it evolved out of the natural history of the world. Schmidt places the two side-by-side in some sort of metaphysical conjunction within the compass of the present day, and by implication fails to account for how (and when, exactly), the one became “different” from the other in the first instance. One way of accounting for this is to say that God made it so. Perhaps we should return to the Book of Genesis for our understanding of human social origins. At least then the metaphysical basis for the assertion of fundamental difference would have at least a basis in compelling myth.

* * *

          Apart from the criticism I have made of myself in this article, there is no doubt much else that can be criticised in the contents of these essays, but I daresay I am not large-minded enough to tackle all of it in a suitably self-recriminating spirit. Posing an enquiry through a series of separate approaches, onslaughts or “raids” positively invites inconsistency, uneven quality not to say repetition. A better, perhaps more disciplined mind would have kept all that under stricter control. To such charges I have only two defences: what might seem to be inconsistency may point to the many dimensions of an overall subject that a single-topic article may not necessarily be able to characterise, and, second, that one must use such talents, tools and opportunities as one has, for better or worse. The object has been to explicate, defend and promote Marxian socialism, and the success or failure of my work will depend upon the reader’s estimate of how effectively – and usefully – that object has been achieved here.

          Meanwhile, “I’d no more think of offering my ideas as immortal truth than I’d think of publishing X-ray photographs of my bones, as eternal.”[20]

---

[1] For just how active, see August H Nimtz Jr., Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to Democratic Breakthrough (Albany, 2000).

[2] See above: “What Is Total Revolt?”

[3] Nature, Society, and Thought vol. 18 no 4 (2005)

[4] VI Lenin, What Is to be Done? transl. by SV and Patrician Utechin (London, 1970)

[5] Azad op. cit. 503

[6] In fact, the “inevitability” of socialism was a theme common to both Marxist and bourgeois writers in the era under discussion. For example it was a cornerstone of the middle-class so-called “lyric socialism” that reached some popularity and electoral success in the United States prior to World War I. There was nothing specifically Marxist in holding such a view since it was easy enough to push socialism “back to the future”: safely ensconced in the world of “tomorrow” - out of sight, out of mind.

[7] Ibid. 509

[8] Ibid. 513

[9] This strikes me as a kind of updated Utilitarianism (“the greatest good for the greatest number”). Have I spotted Jeremy Bentham lurking somewhere in Gramsci’s thought? (Gramsci unaware of this, that is.)

[10] Ibid. 514-515

[11] Ibid. 517

[12] Ibid. 518-519

[13] And when it suits the capitalist class, especially when a decline in profit is experienced, the trade union movement is sidelined, impoverished and proscribed from organising or wider industrial picketing. This is not to deny that it has a crucial if unofficial role as an umbrella for those who do seek to raise working-class consciousness in a revolutionary manner at the workplace, while strikes, both official and unofficial, do give the working class experience in finding itself visibly up against the full panoply of capitalist and state power. But what the movement takes away from this experience of a lasting kind in consciousness is problematical if there is no vanguard party to help draw together the threads of what lie behind the strike and the reasons for it for working people to perceive for themselves and to act upon. 

[14] “Art after all had a share in inventing the idea of socialism, and it wants to have a share of its own now in moulding socialist society.” V.G. Kiernan, “Art and the Necessity of History”, Socialist Register 1965 (London, 1964) 234.

[15] Ibid. 524

[16] Lenin, op. cit. 89-90

[17] At the point of the deepest military crisis for Russia Stalin had to call off the commissars to allow the military generals their head; when, later, victory was in sight Stalin re-instated the commissars.

[18] Pace the views of Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin and some other scientists; see for example his and Richard Levins’ The Dialectical Biologist (London, 1985).

[19] Richard Lewontin, The Doctrine of DNA. Biology as Ideology (London, 1992) 113

[20] Charles Fort, The Books of Charles Fort (Wild Talents) New York, 1959, 942. 

*  *  *  *

Bibliography

Most of the published works consulted in the course of writing these essays, not including web and newspaper press citations in the articles.)

Alexander, Sally:             ‘Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s’, History Workshop 17 (1984)

Allen, Kieran:                  Marx and the Alternative to Capitalism (London, 2011)

Althusser, Louis:               For Marx , transl.  Ben Brewster (London, 1969)

Althusser, L & E Balibar: Reading Capital, transl.  Ben Brewster (London, 1970)

Ankersmit, Frank & Hans Keller (eds):

                                      A New Philosophy of History (London, 1995)

Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob:

                                      Telling the Truth About History (New York, 1994)

Aristotle:                         On the Art of Poetry transl. TS Dorsch (Harmondsworth, 1969)

Arrighi, Giovanni:            The Long Twentieth Century (London, 2010)

Artaud, Antonin:             The Theatre and Its Double: Essays transl. Victor Corti (London, 1970)

Ash, William:                  Morals and Politics (London, 1977)

Ashton, TH & C Philpin (eds):

                                      The Brenner Debates (Cambridge, 1985)

Attridge, D et. al. (eds)     Post-Structuralism and the Question of History (London, 1987)

Azad, Bahman:                ‘The Scientific Basis of the Concept of the Vanguard Party of the Proletariat’, Nature, Society, and Thought vol. 18 no. 4 (2005)

Bartram, Graham & Anthony Waine (eds):

                                      Brecht in Perspective (Harlow, 1987)

Baxandall, Lee (ed):         Radical Perspectives in the Arts (Harmondsworth, 1972)

Beaud, Michel:             A History of Capitalism 1500-2000 transl. T. Dickman & A. Lefebvre (New York, 2001)

Beckerman, Bernard:      Dynamics of Drama: Theory and Method of Analysis (New York, 1970)

Benjamin, Walter:      ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations transl. Harry Zohn (London, 1992)

                                      Understanding Brecht transl. Anna Bostock (London, 1973)

Bentley, Eric:                  The  Life of the Drama (London, 1969)

Bentley, Eric (ed):           The Theory of the Modern Stage: An Introduction to Modern theatre and Drama (Harmondsworth, 1968)

Berkeley, George:            Principles of Human Knowledge (London, 1981)

Bewes, Timothy:              Cynicism and Postmodernity (London, 1997)

Bhaskar, Roy:                 The Possibility of Naturalism (Brighton, 1979)

Blyth, Mark:                    Austerity (New York, 2013)

Bogard, T & WI Oliver (eds):

Modern Drama. Essays in Criticism (New York, 1965)

Bottomore, Tom et. al. (eds):     

A Dictionary of Marxist Thought 2^nd edn. (Oxford, 1995)

Brandt, George (ed):        Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre, 1850-1990 (Oxford, 1998)

Brecht, Bertolt:               Brecht on Theatre: the Development of an Aesthetic ed. & transl. John Willett (London,  1964)

Brooker, Peter:                Bertolt Brecht: Dialectics, Poetry, Politics (London, 1988)

Brown, Callum G:            Postmodernism for Historians (Harlow, 2005)

Brownstein, OL & DM Daubert:

Analytical Sourcebook of Concepts of Dramatic Theory (London, 1981)

Brustein, Robert:             The Theatre of Revolt (New York, 1964)

Burke, Peter:                    History and Social Theory  (London, 1995)

Butterfield, Herbert:        The Whig Interpretation of History (New York, 1965)

Callinicos, Alex:              Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (London, 2002)

                                      Against the Third Way. An Anti-Capitalist Critique (Cambridge, 2001)

                     An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (Cambridge, 2003)

                           'Anthony Giddens: A Contemporary Critique’, in A Callinicos (ed): Marxist Theory (Oxford, 1989)

                              Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social Theory (Cambridge, 1987)

The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (London, 1993)

Theories and Narratives (London, 1995)

Carchedi, Guglielmo   :           Behind the Crisis (Chicago, 2011)     

Carlson, Marvin:             Theories of the Theatre. A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present (Ithaca, 1993)

Carr, EH:                        What Is History? (Harmondsworth, 1990)

Carver, Terrell:                The Postmodern Marx (Manchester, 1998)

Caudwell, Christopher:    Illusion and Reality (London, 1946)

Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture (New York, 1971)

Chalmers, AF:                What Is This Thing Called Science? 2^nd edn. (Milton Keynes, 1990)

Chang, Ha-Joon:             Economics: the User’s Guide (London, 2014)

Childe, V Gordon:            Man Makes Himself (London, 1966)

What Happened in History (Harmondsworth, 1954)

Chomsky, Noam:             Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (London, 2007)

Claeys, Gregory:            ‘Language, Class and Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Economy and Society 14 (1985)

Clark, BH:                       European Theories of the Drama (New York, 1947)

Clark, G Kitson:              The Critical Historian (London, 1970)

Cockshott, WP & A Cottrell:

                                        Towards a New Socialism (Nottingham, 1993)

Cohen, GA:                      Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford, 1978)

Colletti, Lucio:                 Marxism and Hegel transl. Lawrence Garner (London, 1973)

Collingwood, RG:             An Autobiography (Harmondsworth, 1944)

                                      An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford, 2005)

                                      The Idea of History (London, 1961)

Cooper, George:               The Origin of Financial Crises (New York, 2008)

Corey, Lewis:                   Decline of American Capitalism (New York, 1934)

Cornforth, Maurice:          Dialectical Materialism (London, 1952)

                                      Historical Materialism (London, 1953)

Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy (London, 1971)

The Open Philosophy and the Open Society: A Reply to Dr Karl Popper’s Refutations of Marxism  (New York, 1968)

Science Versus Idealism (London, 1955)

Theory of Knowledge (London, 1974)

Daley, James:                 Marx: Justice and Dialectic (Holywood, NI, 1996)

Davis, NZ & Arlette Farge (eds.):

                               A History of Women in the West vol. 3: Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes (Cambridge, Mass., 1993)

Derrida, Jacques:            Of Grammatology transl. GC Spivak (Baltimore, 1997)

Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the New International, transl.  Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1994)

Descartes, René:        Discourse on Method and Other Writings transl. FE Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth, 1968)

De Ste. Croix, GEM:        The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London, 1983)

Dobb, Maurice:                Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London, 1946)

Dray, William:            ‘Philosophy and Historiography’, in Michael Bentley (ed): Companion to Historiography (London, 1997)

Drolet, Michael (ed):        The Postmodernism Reader: Foundational Texts (London, 2004)

Dunham, Barrows:          Man Against Myth (Boston, 1947)

Dyer-Witheford, Nick:     Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (Chicago, 1999)

Eagleton, Terry:               The Idea of Culture (Oxford, 2000)

Ideology. An Introduction (London, 1991)

The Illusions of Postmodernism  (Oxford, 1997)

Edgley, Roy:                    ‘Science, Values and Marxism’, Fundamenta Scientiae vol. 7 no.3 & 4 (1987)

Egri, Lajos:                     The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives (New York, 1960)

Elam, Keir:                     The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London, 1980)

Ellis-Fermor, Una:         ‘Introduction’ to Henrik Ibsen, Three Plays (Harmondsworth, 1954)

Elster, Jon:                     Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge, 1985)

Elton, GR:                       The Practice of History (London, 1969)

Engels, Frederick:           Anti-Duhring (Moscow, 1975)

                           The Condition of the Working-Class in England: from Personal Observation and Authentic Sources, Introduction by EJ Hobsbawm (London, 1969)

                                      Dialectics of Nature transl. Clemens Dutt (London, 2007)

Esslin, Martin:                An Anatomy of Drama (London, 1978)

                                      Artaud (London, 1976)

                           Brecht: A Choice of Evils. A Critical Study of the Man, His Work and His Opinions (London, 1980)

                          The Field of Drama: How the signs of drama create meaning on stage and screen (London, 1987)

                            The Theatre of the Absurd (Harmondsworth, 1980)

Evans, Richard J:            In Defence of History (London, 1997)

Ferraro, Joseph:           Freedom and Determination in History According to Marx and Engels (New York, 1992)

Fine, Ben & Alfredo Saad-Filho:

                                      Marx’s Capital 4^th edn. (London, 2004)

Firth, Raymond:              Human Types (New York, 1956)

Fischer, Ernst:               The Necessity of Art transl. Anna Bostock (Harmondsworth, 1964)

Fischer, Ernst & Franz Marek:

                                      Marx In His Own Words transl. Anna Bostock (Harmondsworth, 1970)

Fisher, HAL:                    A History of Europe (London, 1936)

Fleischer, Helmut:           Marxism and History transl. Eric Mosbacher (London, 1973)

Fort, Charles:                  The Books of Charles Fort (New York, 1959)

Fortier, Mark:                 Theory/Theatre: An Introduction (London, 1997)

Foster, John Bellamy:      Ecology Against Capitalism (New York, 2002)

                                      Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York, 2000)

Fracchia, Joseph:       ‘Marx’s Aufhebung Of Philosophy and the Foundations of a Materialist Science of History’, History and Theory vol. XXX (1991)

Fritzman, JM:                 Hegel (Cambridge, 2014)

Fromm, Erich:                 Beyond the Chains of Illusion (London, 2006)

                                      The Crisis in Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth, 1976)

                                      Man for Himself (Abingdon, 2003)

                                      Marx’s Concept of Man (New York, 1985)

                                      To Have or To Be? (New York, 1982)

Fuchs, Christian:            ‘The Self-Organisation of Matter’, Nature, Society and Thought vol. 16 no. 3 (2003)

Fukuyama, Francis:        The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1992)

Fulbrook, Mary:               Historical Theory (London, 2002)

Galbraith, JK:                 Great Crash 1929 (London, 2009)

                                      A History of Economics (London, 1991)

Garaudy, Roger:              Karl Marx: the Evolution of His Thought (New York, 1967)

Gardiner, Patrick (ed):     The Philosophy of History (London, 1974)

Geary, Dick:                    European Labour Protest 1848-1939 (London, 1981)

Geertz, Clifford:               The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (London, 1993)

Giddens, Anthony:    A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism 2^nd edn. (Basingstoke, 1995)

Gillott, John & Manjit Kumar:

                                      Science and the Retreat from Reason (New York, 1997)

Ginzburg, Carlo:              History, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover, NH, 1999)

Girdner, Eddie J:             ‘Neoliberalism and Class Formation on a Global Scale’, Nature, Society, and Thought vol. 19 no. 2 (2006)

Gleick, James:                Chaos. Making a New Science (London, 1998)

Gramsci, Antonio:        Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci  ed. & transl. Q. Hoare & G. Nowell Smith (London, 1971)

Gray, John:                     False Dawn. The Delusions of Global Capitalism (London, 1999)

Gray, Robert:                  ‘The Deconstructing of the English Working Class’, Social History 11 (1986)

Gray, Ronald:                  Brecht: The Dramatist (Cambridge, 1976)

Griffiths, Stuart:             How Plays Are Made (Oxford, 1989)

Guest, David:                  A Textbook of Dialectical Materialism (London, 1940)

Harlan, David:            ‘Intellectual History and the Return of Literature’ American Historical Review 94 (1989)

Harman, Chris:            Economics of the Madhouse: Capitalism and the Market Today (London, 1995)

                                      Marxism and History: Two Essays (London, 1998)

                                      Selected Writings (London, 2010)

                                      Zombie Capitalism (London, 2007)

Harvey, David:                Companion to Marx’s Capital (London, 2010)

                                    Enigma of Capitalism (London, 2011)The New Imperialism (Oxford, 2005)

Hegel, GWF:                    Essential Writings, ed. Frederick FG Weiss (New York, 1974(

Hegel on Tragedy, ed. A & H Paolucci (Westport, 1978)

                                      Logic, transl. William Wallace (Oxford, 1975)

                            Phenomenology of Spirit, transl.  AV Miller (Oxford, 1979)

                            The Philosophy of History transl. J Sibree (New York, 1956)

                            Science of Logic, transl. AV Miller (New York, 1998)

Heller, Henry:                 Birth of Capitalism (London, 2011)

                                      Cold War and the New Imperialism (New York, 2006)

Hilton, Rodney:               The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1987)

Hindess, Barry & Paul Q Hirst:

                                      Pre-capitalist Modes of Production (London, 1975)

Hobsbawm, EJ:               Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth, 1971)

                                      Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1964)

                                ‘Notes on Class Consciousness’, in E.J. Hobsbawm: Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1984)

                                      On History (London, 1997)

Hoffman, John:               Marxism and the Theory of Praxis (New York, 1975)

Holthausen, Hans Egon: ‘Brecht’s Dramatic Theory’, transl.  JF Sammons, in Peter Demetz (ed): Brecht. A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1962)

Hough, Graham:              The Romantic Poets (London, 1963)

Hudson, Pat:                   History By Numbers: An Introduction to Quantitative Approaches (London, 2000)

                                      The Industrial Revolution (London, 1992)

Hughes-Warrington, Marnie:

                                      Fifty Key Thinkers on History (London, 2000)

Hume, David:                  Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals 3^rd ed. (Oxford, 1992)

Hunt, EK & JG Schwartz (eds.):

                                      Critique of Economic Theory (Harmondsworth, 1972)

Iggers, Georg D:             Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, NH, 1997)

Illich, Ivan et. al.:            Disabling Professions (London, 1977)

Ilyenkov, EV:                   Dialectical Logic transl. H Campbell Creighton (Delhi, 2008)

                                    Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx’s ‘Capital’ transl. Sergei Syrovatkin (Delhi, 2013)

                                   Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism  (London, 1982)

Ionesco, Eugene:            The Killer and other Plays transl. Donald Watson (New York, 1960)

                      Rhinoceros, The Chairs, The Lesson transl. Donald Watson (Harmondsworth, 1962)

Jackson, TA:            Dialectics. The Logic of Marxism and Its Critics: An Essay in Exploration (New York, 1971)

Jacoby, Russell:            ‘A New Intellectual History?’ American Historical Review (April, 1992)

Jakubowski, Franz:         Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism  transl. Anne Booth (London, 1976)

Jameson, Fredric:          The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London, 1998)

Jenkins, Keith:             On ‘What Is History?’ From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White  (London, 1995)

                                      Refiguring History. New Thoughts on an Old Discipline (London, 2003)

Jenkins, Keith (ed.):        The Postmodern History Reader (London, 1997)

Jenkins, Keith & Alun Munslow (eds):

                                      The Nature of History Reader (London, 2004)

Johnston, WM:                The Formative Years of RG Collingwood (The Hague, 1967)

Jones, Gareth Stedman:  ‘The Changing Face of 19^th-Century Britain’, History Today (May, 1991)

                                    Languages of Class. Studies in English Working Class History 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983)

                                     ‘The Language of Chartism’, in J Epstein & D Thompson (eds): The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture 1830-60 (London, 1982)

Jovanovski, Thomas:       ‘Postmodernism’s Self-Nullifying Reading of Nietzsche’, Inquiry, An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy vol. 44 no. 4 (December 2001)

Joyce, Patrick:                Democratic Subjects: the Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994)

Joyce, Patrick (ed):          Class (London, 1995)

Katz, Claudio J:               From Feudalism to Capitalism: Marxian theories of class struggle and social change (London, 1989)

Katz, Stephen:                 ‘Symbols at Work and Play’ in Fontana Postmodernism Reader (London, 1996)

Kaufmann, FW:             ‘Ibsen’s Conception of Truth’ in Rolf Fjelds (ed): Ibsen: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1965)

Kaye, Harvey J:               The Powers of the Past (Minneapolis, 1991)

Kemp, Tom:                     Marx’s ‘Capital’ Today (London, 1982)

Kerr, Walter:                   How Not to Write A Play (London, 1956)

Kierkegaard, Søren:         The Present Age transl. Alexander Dru (London, 1962)

Kiernan, VG:                  ‘Art and the Necessity of History’, in Socialist Register 65 (London, 1964)

Kitto, HDF:                     Form and Meaning in Drama: A Study of Six Greek Plays and of ‘Hamlet’ (London, 1956)

                                      Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study (London, 1966)

Kirk, Neville:                   ‘History, language, ideas and postmodernism: a materialist view’, Social History  vol. 19 no. 2 (May, 1994)

                        ‘In Defence of Class’, International Review of Social History 32 (1987)

Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane (ed):

                                     A History of Women in the West vol. 2: Silences of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)

Klein, Naomi:               The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism  (London, 2007)

Kliman, Andrew:             Failure of Capitalist Production (London, 2012)

                                      Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’ (Plymouth, 2007)

Kodischek, Theodore:      ‘The Gendering of the British Working Class’, Gender and History 9 (1997-98)

Kolakowski, Lezek:          Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution volume 1: The Founders transl. PS Falla (Oxford, 1978)

Korsch, Karl:                   Karl Marx (London, 1938)

                                      Marxism and Philosophy transl. Fred Halliday (London, 1970)

                                      Three Essays on Marxism transl. TM Holmes (London, 1971)

Kosik, Karel:            Dialectics of the Concrete transl. K Kovanda with J Schmidt (Dordrecht, 1976)

Kuhn, TS:                       The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (London, 1962)

Landes, Joan B:              Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, 1988)

Lane, Harlan:                  The Wild Boy of Aveyon (London, 1977)

Lao Tzu’s Tao te Ching, transl. Ralph Alan Dale (London, 2008)

Lao Tzu’s Tao te Ching, transl. Timothy Freke (London, 1995)

Lapavitsas, Costas:         Profiting Without Producing (London, 2013)

Larrain, Jorge:                Marxism and Ideology (Basingstoke, 1983)

                                      A Reconstruction of Historical Materialism (London, 1986)

Leakey, Richard & Roger Lewin:

                                   Origins Reconsidered. In Search of What Makes Us Human (London, 1993)

Lenin, VI:                        Collected Works vol. 38: Philosophical Notebooks, transl. Clemens Dutt (Moscow, 1963)

                               Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy (Moscow, 1952)

                         What Is to be Done? transl. SV and Patricia Utechin (London, 1970)

Lewontin, Richard:          The Doctrine of DNA. Biology as Ideology (Harmondsworth, 1993)

Lewontin, Richard & Richard Levins:

                                Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health (New York, 2007)

                                      The Dialectical Biologist (London, 1985)

Llorente, Renzo:              ‘Maurice Cornforth’s Contribution to Marxist Metaethics’, Nature, Society, and Thought vol. 16 no. 3 (2003)

Lloyd, Christopher:          ‘For Realism and Against the Inadequacies of Common Sense: A Response to Arthur Marwick’, Journal of Contemporary History vol. 31 (1996)

Locke, John:                   Second Treatise of Government ed. Peter Laslett (New York, 1963)

Lukacs, George:            History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics transl. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1971)

Luxemburg, Rosa:        The Accumulation of Capital transl. by Agnes Schwartzchild (London, 1963)

                                      Selected Political Writings ed. Dick Howard (New York, 1971)

Lyotard, Jean-Francois:   The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge transl. G Bennington & B Massumi (Manchester, 1984)

Macquarrie, John:           Existentialism (Harmondsworth, 1977)

McBride, William L:         The Philosophy of Marx (London, 1977)

McCrone, John:               The Ape That Spoke. Language and the Evolution of the Human Mind (London, 1991)

McCullagh, C Behan:       The Truth of History (London, 1998)

McLellan, David:             Marx Before Marxism (Harmondsworth, 1972)

McNally, David:               Against the Market (London, 1993)

Mandel, Ernest:              Late Capitalism transl. Joris de Bres (London, 1975)

                                      Marxist Economic Theory transl. Brian Pearce (London, 1969)

Marcuse, Herbert:           Reason and Revolution (London, 1969)

                                      Soviet Marxism. A Critical Analysis (Harmondsworth, 1971)

Marwick, Arthur:             The Nature of History (London, 1993)

                                     ‘Two Approaches to Historical Study: the Metaphysical (Including Postmodernism) and the Historical’, Journal of Contemporary History vol. 30 (1995)

Marx, Karl:                     Capital I transl. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth, 1976)

                                 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 transl. Martin Milligan (London, 1970)

                           The First International and After. Political Writings vol. 3 ed. with introduction by David Fernbach (Harmondsworth, 1974)

                                      Grundrisse transl. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth, 1993)

                                      The Poverty of Philosophy (New York n.d.)

                                    Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy transl. TM Bottomore; eds. TM Bottomore & M Rubel (Harmondsworth, 1969)

                           Surveys From Exile. Political Writings vol. 2 ed. with introduction by David Fernbach (Harmondsworth, 1973)

Marx, Karl & Frederick Engels:

                                     The Communist Manifesto ed. Frederic L Bender (New York, 1988)

                                      The German Ideology Part One ed. CJ Arthur (London, 1970)

                                      Selected Correspondence transl. I Lasker (Moscow, 1965)

                                      Selected Writings revised edn. (London, 1991)

Mason, Paul:                   Postcapitalism (London, 2016)

Mattick, Paul:                 Marx and Keynes (London, 1969)

Mattick, Paul (jr):            Business as Usual (London, 2011)

Mayfield, David & Susan Thorne:

                                      ‘Social History and its discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the politics of language’, Social History vol. 17 no. 2 (May, 1992)

Mazlish, Bruce:               The Riddle of History. The Great Speculators from Vico to Freud  (New York, 1966)

Mepham, John & David-Hillel Rubens (eds):

                                 Issues in Marxist Philosophy vol. 1: Dialectics and Method (Hassocks, 1979)

Meszaros, Istvan:            Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition (London, 1995)

Challenge and Burden of Historical Time (New York 2008)

                                      Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London, 1971)

                            The Necessity of Social Control (New York, 2015)

                            The Power of Ideology (Hemel Hempstead, 1989)

                      Socialism or Barbarism: From the “American Century” to the Crossroads (New York, 2001)

                                      Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness I (New York, 2010)

                                      Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness II (New York, 2011)

Miller, Arthur:                 ‘Introduction’ to Collected Plays (London, 1958)

Mithen, Steven:               The Prehistory of the Mind (London, 1996)

Montagu, Ashley:             Man: His First Million Years (New York, 1958)

Morris, RJ:                     Class and Class Consciousness in the Industrial Revolution 1780-1850 (London, 1979)

Munslow, Alun:               The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies (London, 2000)

Murray, Patrick:              Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1990)

Neale, Jonathan:          What’s Wrong With America? How the rich and powerful have changed America and now want to change the world (London, 2004)

Nicoll, Allardyce:             An Introduction to Dramatic Theory (London, 1923)

                                      The Theory of the Drama (New York, 1966)

Nietzsche, Friedrich:       Thus Spoke Zarathustra transl. RJ Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1969)

Nimtz Jr., August H:    Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany, 2000)

Nizan, Paul:                  The Watchdogs: Philosophers and the Established Order transl. Paul Fittingoff (New York, 1971)

Norman, Richard & Sean Sayers:

                                      Hegel, Marx and Dialectic: A Debate (Brighton, 1980)

Norris, Christopher:        ‘Truth, Science and the Growth of Knowledge’, New Left Review 210 (March/April, 1995)

Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (London, 1992)

                                     What’s Wrong with Post-Modernism.. Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (London, 1990)

Novack, George:               An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism (New York, 1986)

                                      Polemics in Marxist Philosophy (New York, 1995)

Oakeshott, Michael:        On History and Other Essays (Oxford, 1982)

Ollman, Bertell:        Alienation. Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society 2^nd edn(Cambridge, 1996)

                                      Dance of the Dialectic. Steps in Marx’s Method (Chicago, 2003)

                            Dialectical Investigations (New York, 1993)

Ormerod, Paul:                The Death of Economics (London, 1994)

Osborne, Peter:               How to Read Marx (London, 2005)

Outram, Dorinda:            ‘Women and the Discourse of the French Revolution’, in P Burke & Roy Porter, eds., The Social History of Language (Cambridge, 1987)

Palmer, Bryan D:           Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, 1990)

                                    ‘Is There Now, Or Has There Ever Been, A Working Class?’, History Today (March, 1992)

Panitch, Leo & Sam Gindin:

                                      The Making of Global Capitalism (London, 2012)

Perelman, Michael:         Railroading Economics: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology (New York, 2006)

Perry, Matt:                     Marxism and History (Basingstoke, 2002)

Plato:                              The Republic transl. HDP Lee (Harmondsworth, 1965)

Polanyi, Karl:                  The Great Transformation (Boston, 1957)

Popper, Karl:                   Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London, 2002)

                                   The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2: Hegel and Marx  (London, 2003)

Prawer, SS:                     Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford, 1978)

Price, Richard:                British Society 1680-1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change (Cambridge, 1999)

Priest, Stephen:               The British  Empiricists from Hobbes to Ayer (Harmondsworth, 1990)

Quinn, Michael L:           The Semiotic  Stage: Prague School Theater Theory (New York, 1995)

John Rees:                 ‘The Revolutionary Ideas of Frederick Engels’, International Socialism 65 (1994)

Rees, John (ed):               Essays on Historical Materialism (London, 1998)

Roberts, Geoffrey:         ‘Narrative History As A Way of Life’, Journal of Contemporary History vol. 31 (1996)

Roberts, Marcus:             Analytical Marxism: A Critique (London, 1996)

Rorty, Richard:            The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago, 1967)

Rose, Steven, RC Lewontin & LJ Kamin:

                                      Not In Our Genes. Biology, Ideology and Human Nature (London, 1988)

Rubin, II:                    Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value transl. M Samardzija & F Perlman (Delhi, 2008)

Samuel, Raphael:            ‘Reading the Signs II’ History Workshop Journal 33 (1992)

Sanbonmatsu, John:    ‘Postmodernism and the Corruption of the Academic Intelligentsia’, in Leo Panitch & Colin Leys (eds): Socialist Register 2006 (London, 2005)

                                 The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, And the Making of a New Political Subject (New York, 2004)

Sayer, Andrew:                Why We Can’t Afford the Rich (Bristol, 2015)

Sayer, Derek:                 The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism (Oxford, 1987)

Sayers, Sean:               Reality and Reason: Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge (Oxford, 1985)

Schechner, Richard:        Performance Theory (London, 2003)

Schlemm, Annette:          ‘New Sciences and Our Future’, Nature, Society, and Thought vol. 18 no. 3 (2005)

Schmidt, Alfred:              The Concept of Nature in Marx (London, 1971)

Scott, Joan Wallach:        Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988)

Sewell Jr., WH:               ‘How Classes Are Made: Critical Reflections on EP Thompson’s Theory of Working-Class Formation’, in HJ Kaye & K McClelland (eds): EP Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Oxford, 1990)

Seymour, Richard:           Against Austerity (London, 2014)

Sheptulin, AP:                 Marxist-Leninist Philosophy transl. S Ponomarenko & A Timofevev (Moscow, 1978)

Shoemaker, Robert B:      Gender in English Society 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London, 1998)

Sidnell, MJ (ed):              Sources of Dramatic Theory vol. 2: Voltaire to Hugo (Cambridge, 1994)

Siegel, Paul N:                 The Meek and the Militant: Religion and Power Across the World (London, 1986)

Skinner, Quentin:           ‘Freedom and the Historian’ (Chapter 3), in Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998)

Slaughter, C:                   Marxism and the Class Struggle (London, 1975)

Smith, Adam:                  The Wealth of Nations (Harmondsworth, 1977)

Smith, Cyril:                   Marx at the Millennium (London, 1996)

Smith, Murray EG:          Global Capitalism in Crisis (Black Point, Nova Scotia 2010)

Smith, Tony:                   Dialectical Social Theory and Its Critics: From Hegel to Analytical Marxism and Postmodernism (Albany, 1993)

                                   The Logic of Marx’s Capital: Replies to Hegelian Criticisms (Albany, 1990)

Somerville, John:            The Philosophy of Marxism (New York, 1967)

Southgate, Beverley:     ‘History and Metahistory: Marwick versus White’, Journal of Contemporary History vol. 31 (1996)

                               History: What and Why? Ancient, Modern and Postmodern Perspectives 2nd edn. (London, 2001)

Specter, Michael:         ‘Political Science: The Bush Administration’s war on the laboratory’, New Yorker 13.03.06

Spengler, Oswald:           The Decline of the West transl. CF Atkinson (London, 1926-28)

Staats, Arthur W:            The Marvellous Learning Animal (Amherst, NY 2012)

Stace, WT:                       The Philosophy of Hegel (London, 1955)

Steinberg, Marc W:     ‘Culturally speaking: finding a commons between post-structuralism and the Thompsonian perspective’, Social History vol. 21 no. 2 (May, 1996)

Stewart, Michael:            Keynes and After (Harmondsworth, 1970)

Stone, Lawrence:             ‘History and Postmodernism’ Past and Present 131 (1991)

Strindberg, August:        ‘Author’s Preface’ to Miss Julie, in Strindberg: Seven Plays, transl. Arvid Paulson (New York, 1960)

Sweezy, Paul M:              Four Lectures on Marxism (London, 1981)

                                      The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York, 1970)

Sweezy, Paul M et. al:      The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1978)

Taylor, John Russell:   Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama (Harmondsworth, 1963)

Thompson, Edward P:      The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963)

                                      The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978)

Thomson, David:             Europe Since Napoleon (Harmondsworth 1982)

Thomson, David (ed):       Political Ideas (Harmondsworth, 1975)

Timpanaro, Sebastiano:   On Materialism transl. Lawrence Garner (London,  1975)

Tosh, John:                     The Pursuit of History 3^rd edn. (Harlow, 2000)

Trotsky, Leon:                 History of the Russian Revolution transl. Max Eastman (London, 1965)

                                      My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (New York, 1970)

                             1905 transl. Anna Bostock (London, 1972)

Valtin, Jan:                     Out of the Night (London, 1988)

Volonsinov, VN:               Marxism and the Philosophy of Language transl. L Mateka and IR Titunik (London, 1986)

Wallerstein, Immanuel:   Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization revised edn. (London, 1995)

Warren, John:                 History and the Historians (London, 1999)

Weeks, John F:                Economics of the 1% (London, 2014)

Wheen, Francis:           How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. A Short History of Modern Delusions (London, 2004)

                                      Karl Marx (London, 2000)

White, Hayden:           The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation  (Baltimore, 1987)

                                      ‘Response to Arthur Marwick’, Journal of Contemporary History vol. 30 (1995)

                                   Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978)

Wilde, Laurence:             Marx and Contradiction (Aldershot, 1989)

Williams, Howard:           Hegel, Heraclitus and Marx’s Dialectic (Hemel Hempstead, 1989

Williams, Raymond:         Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (Harmondsworth, 1978)
Wood, Charles Erskine Scott:
                                        Heavenly Discourse (New York, 1946)

Wood, Ellen Meiksins:     Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge, 1995)

The Origin of Capitalism  (New York, 1999)

                                      The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (London, 1986)

Wood, Ellen M & John Bellamy Foster (eds):

                                      In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda (New York, 1997)

Woods, Alan & Ted Grant:  Reason in Revolt 2^nd edn. (London, 2007)

Wright, Eric Olin, Andrew Levine, Elliott Sober:

                                      Reconstructing Marxism.. Essays on Explanation and the Theory of History (London, 1992)

Yannielli, Len:             ‘Of Slime Molds and Marxist Ideology: Expansive versus Constrictive Thinking’, Nature, Society, and Thought vol. 16 no. 4 (2003)

Zagorin, Perez:                ‘Historiography and Postmodernism: Reconsiderations’, History and Theory. Studies in the Philosophy of History vol. XXIX (1990)

Zeleny, Jindrich:             The Logic of Marx transl. & ed. Terrell Carver (Totowa, NJ, 1980)