Ib Gram-Jensen - Experience and Historical Materialism

This collection of five relatively self-contained essays exhibits a certain oddity which requires explanation. Readers will find references to another text by this writer: Structure, Agency and Theory, and indeed passages quoted verbatim from it; but they will not, at the time of writing, be able to locate that text anywhere. The simple reason for this is that Structure, Agency and Theory has not, to this date, been published or even printed and is consequently not accessible. Whether or not this will remain the case is, at the time of writing, impossible to say. References below to Structure, Agency and Theory are consequently not very precise, as references to a specific page would not make any sense. As things stand, a brief summary of some main results presented in it seems meaningful, not least considering the problems of historical materialism left unresolved by the ebb of interest in it.

The first two essays deal with subjects which are touched on in Structure, Agency and Theory, but they have a somewhat narrower focus. The third one is intended to offer a relatively brief sketch of the version or revision of classical historical materialism suggested in Structure, Agency and Theory. Although all the essays can be read independently,History. There is no attempt to cover all aspects of Laclau & Mouffes or Jenkins arguments; the emphasis is on demonstrating their shortcomings as alternatives to historical materialism.

As both, in their different ways, deny the explanatory power of historical materialism, the problematic guiding these chapters may be condensed into the questions whether

The problematic of Structure, Agency and Theory and its theoretical and historical context was presented as follows:

The work embodied in the present text originally centred on the problematic of analysing the capitalist state, and accounting for its concrete role and functioning in advanced capitalist societies. Considerations on various Marxist approaches to the subject led to the conclusion that it is impossible to work out a general concept of the capitalist state from which its historical functions can be derived. The social structure imposes limits and pressures on the state, but within those limits its concrete role and functioning depend on historical eventuation which is, to be sure, determined by the structural context, but neither reducible to, nor derivable from it.

Along with this, if based on a less focused exploration, university training in history and social studies as well as the experience of history from the early 1970s and on lead to the following more general assumptions:

The question is whether this failure of Marx expectations and predictions about the supersession of capitalism is accountable for within a theoretical framework which is, at least in a broad but still meaningful sense, Marxist or historical-materialist, in spite of such more or less far-reaching modifications of the original, and various other, conception(s) of historical materialism as turn out to be necessary. It is argued that if the conception of the interaction between social circumstances and agency suggested below is substituted for the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development, the failure of Marx expectations and predictions to come true can be accounted for cogently and consistently with Marx structural analysis of Capital (which is not to suggest that the latter is perfectly complete and correct on all points) and at least the minimum of Marxist assumptions which is necessary to answer the above question in the affirmative.

What are those assumptions? As several strands and varieties of Marxism can be identified, the answer cannot be taken for granted, but the rejection of any of the following three assumptions would, in the opinion of this writer, be inconsistent with the claim to argue within anything describable as a historical-materialist or Marxist framework or the Marxist tradition in any meaningful sense of those terms. In addition, abandoning any of these three assumptions would imply an obvious answer to the question why Marx expectations have not come true, whereas upholding them suggests its relevance:

It may be just as well to warn readers at the outset that while the suggested conception of the nature of the process of historical development derives from historical materialism and is indeed, in the opinion of this writer, a variety of historical materialism, it is also, in a real sense, a revised, or revisionist, variety of it, which may cause scandal to some, and give rise to misunderstandings. A brief summary of some main points of the text may, therefore, be useful. The suggested theoretical position rejects collective subjects and the reduction of human agents (their consciousness, individuality and actions) to the mere supports or products of structural causality. It rejects the reduction of human agents and agency to discursive articulation or ideological interpellation, but acknowledges the irreducibility of agents articulation of their experiences of and responses to their lived reality to simple (and hence derivable) effects of that reality. And it rejects Marx and Engels conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations, but accepts their general historical-materialist approach, their critique of the capitalist mode of production and type of society, and the objective interest of the working class in accomplishing the transition from capitalism to socialism and eventually classless communist society while, however regretfully, rejecting their expectations and predictions of its inevitability along with the idea of the dialectic of forces and relations of production supposed to prompt or force the working class to effect it.

Today, disbelief in Marx and Engels expectations and predictions that the supersession of capitalism by socialism and eventually classless communist society is inevitable is in fact probably less likely to cause scandal than is the assertion that they actually did nourish such expectations and make such predictions or, at least, that they actually believed in them. A single quotation will suffice to represent a widespread argument to the contrary: