Professional Documents
Culture Documents
RethinkingHistory"FromBelow"
byLymanH.Legters
The following ad supports maintaining our C.E.E.O.L. service
Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:4/1986,pages:506507,onwww.ceeol.com.
0260--8448 $2.00
Praxis International
507
or much of an advance over ordinary historiographical procedures (which are the ones he used to uncover a particular suppression). Historians were discovering oversights and explaining suppressions long before Freud appeared and, it might be added, Marx himself can be quite useful as a guide to explaining suppressions of pertinent evidence (though perhaps not those of w4ich he may himself have been guilty!). 5. The discussion cannot be fruitfully pursued very much further, I think, without a more precise and critical assessment of the weight to be assigned to class origin, occupational status, and the possibility of movement by an individual across class and occupational lines. I do not think that we are likely to clarify matters by absolutizing any of those or by freezing them at some point in time. As a historian I would be inclined (as I intimated in my article) to seek illumination through closer examination of particular cases, especially that of French syndicalism. Perceived at the time as anti-Marxist (partly because of what they claimed about themselves, partly no doubt by reason of anarchist associations), the syndicalists were certainly the enemy of social democratic party bureaucracies as well as vanguard party conceptions of their time. Yet they preserved a Marxian accent on self-emancipation that had all but disappeared among orthodox Marxists. It may be that Marx contributed in perverse ways to that disappearance, but then we are entitled to deplore his conduct on the strength of his own theoretical teaching.