I’m happy to see J.A. Mann’s recent defense of Philip Foner, whose work, though not without its flaws (especially regarding the Indigenous), remains hugely valuable for any American communist. The sheer scale of his contributions to this country’s labor history are without equal. As his nephew, Eric Foner, put it:
He edited the writings of Frederick Douglass at a time when, believe it or not, nobody remembered him. He edited seven volumes of documents on the history of black labor in the United States, and collections of material from black political conventions in the 19th century. And he did all of it without research assistants or grants. This debate is not doing justice to his contributions to scholarship.
We also shouldn’t forget Philip’s monumental (formerly 10 but now 11 volume) History of the Labor Movement in the United States. It would therefore be a great loss to reduce him to supposedly ‘bad scholarship,’ a label of which we should be more skeptical and even resistant.
Though I’m not a trained historian, I’ve considered myself a sincere student of history for many years, and I’ve always been confused by the idea that new scholarship was automatically ‘better’ scholarship. Of course, later writing has the advantage of newer primary sources and insights, but the quality of analysis ultimately rests upon the quality of historian, which isn’t guaranteed by recency. Is there anyone who has outdone Foner’s history of American labor? Anyone who has bested Braudel’s Civilization & Capitalism or his Mediterranean & the Mediterranean World? Or surpassed Carr’s A History of Soviet Russia? Or rivaled Hobsbawm’s Age Of series? Or even mimicked Batatu’s The Old Social Classes and Revolutionary Movements of Iraq? We can go on. I don’t know of any such authors–I welcome recommendations–suggesting that if we want to learn that history, it’s exactly these texts which we should read.
Yet, I wouldn’t be alone in saying that modern academic history isn’t often so kind to classic works, especially Marxist ones, like these. I was once informed that citations to Hobsbawm–deemed ‘too old to be of present use’–and the Marxian content of my argument called into question the quality of a piece that I had submitted. I eventually withdrew it entirely. It’s almost cartoonish, but plenty of people have had similar experiences. Most are as petty as mine, but some are as despicable as Foner’s or David Abraham’s, an excellent historian whose career was ruined seemingly due to errors he made in his book, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, but actually due to his Marxist thesis, deemed heretical by academic history during the 1980s.1 The book has gone by the wayside, and the few citations to it invite rank concern-trolling over ‘quality scholarship’. Even ostensibly celebrated texts, like Black Reconstruction by WEB Du Bois, which have completely re-shaped a field (in this case, Civil War and Post-Bellum history), aren’t spared this treatment. The specifically Marxist content of Du Bois’s masterpiece has become embarrassing, and it’s no coincidence that Eric Foner’s book, excellent though it is, has in many ways replaced it as the foundational text. Foner openly admits his debt to Du Bois, and the two books greatly overlap, but where they differ is important.2 The two authors have very distinct politics. Du Bois argues explicitly that the Reconstruction South was a dictatorship of the proletariat, akin to Soviet Russia or Maoist China, with lessons of global importance–indeed, he even argues that its success could’ve prevented the Great War! Foner’s Reconstruction is much more modest in comparison. It was a revolution, to be sure, but still a bourgeois one of only national scope. This is a much more palatable lesson, hence its widespread acceptance. When it comes to history, these newer works are coincidentally more liberal.
The debates over the French Revolution, discussed at length elsewhere by D. Parkinson, are especially illustrative of this. For decades, the Marxist interpretation–pioneered by the great Georges Lefebvre–was authoritative, but it was attacked during the 70s and 80s by right-wing historians. They succeeded and the Marxist view fell out of favor. Now, Lefebvre’s and Albert Soboul’s names are dirty words when discussing 1789. After all, they’re ‘outdated and bad scholarship.’ Yet, something tells me that despite its considerable age, Lefebvre’s Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution Française (1924) remains unrivaled. It’s worth noting that liberal scholars still haven’t produced a coherent narrative which explains the Revolution. It seems that simply proclaiming the facts is sufficient.
In short, new doesn’t equate to better, and the idea that it does is a smokescreen for the political defeat of Marxism, or at least Marxian analysis, in scholarship. Of course, I wouldn’t ever suggest uncritically accepting the words of past writers, including (or especially) Marxists–that would make for very bad history–but that we should challenge the definition of ‘academic standards.’ This means a spirited defense of the Marxist historical method, which begins with a defense of classic works of Marxian or left history, as Mann has done here for Foner.
Comradely,
R. Ashlar
- For further detail, see: Jairus Banaji, ‘Abraham’s exile: the sad story of a young Marxist historian’, accessed: 12 Oct., 2022. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/node/1730.
- See: Noel Ignatiev, ‘”The American Blindspot”: Reconstruction According to Eric Foner and W.E.B. Du Bois’, Le Travail, 31 (Spring, 1993). (Link).