The Eclipse of Materialism: Marxism and the Writing of Social History in the 1980s

Abstract

This is not a good time to be a historical materialist. It is not even a good time to be a historian. Explaining this negative conjuncture and detailing its dimensions would be a large project involving a many-sided appreciation of current economic, political and intellectual trends. Each strand in this rope strangling the possibilities of historical materialism and its project of understanding and appreciating the past so as to be able to change the present and transform the future would require exploration and critique. Here I will only allude to the extent to which one decisive and determining force in this conjuncture has been Stalinism's final instance. For surely no specific process has more single-handedly opened the floodgates of attack on Marxism and its analytic categories and political project than the collapse of the degenerate and deformed workers states in which socialism/communism had supposedly been constructed. This world historic event, in the making since the mid-1920s, but associated most strongly with ruptures such as 1956 and 1968, reached a new culmination in the 1980s. It necessarily conditioned much of the climate in which the scholarship of that decade matured.