Historical materialism describes history “dialectically” by positing the dynamic interaction between the two necessary conditions--reflecting our human nature--that determine our human, historical project: (1)Natural necessity-- our condition as natural beings that absolutely depend on our natural environment to sustain and reproduce ourselves, and (2) historical necessity: our condition as self-conscious natural beings, who, in our own minds, objectify the world and are able to create societies to mediate our metabolic interaction with nature--and, when necessary, change them. These changes within and between societies--interacting, contradicting, colliding with one another--constitute the complex, non-linear, often paradoxical story of this evolution--our consciousness of the human condition and its "project": history.  Engels put in this way in a letter to Marx in 1853:

“I have the feeling that one fine day, thanks to the helplessness and spinelessness of all the others, our party will find itself forced into power, whereupon it will have to enact things that are not immediately in our own, but rather in the general, revolutionary....interest; in which event, spurred on by the proletarian populous, and bound by our own published statements...--more or less wrongly interpreted...and impulsively pushed through in the midst of party strife--we shall find ourselves forced to make communist experiments which...[will be]...untimely.  One then proceeds to lose one’s head--only physically speaking I hope--,  a reaction sets in and, until such time as the world is capable of passing historical judgement on this kind of thing, one will be regarded, not only as a brute beast...but also as stupid...  I don’t very well think of how it could happen otherwise...”

This could have been Lenin on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power-- despite the backward conditions in Czarist Russian and their isolation following the collapse of the 2nd International. As human, conscious, responsible human beings, they had not choice. Tragedy has been a necessary part of human history. 

Historical materialism, as a scientific tool and a philosophical stance is strongly influenced by Hegel, Darwin, radical (often idealistic) French and English egalitarianism, and the philological anthropology of the 19th century.  

It adopts Hegel’s dialectic and his view that human history is driven by a kind of collective consciousness (a “zeitgeist”), rippling through the human race, unequally, but resolving itself into various settled (often competing) social orders. It discards Hegel’s idealistic belief that the process is divinely directed, and adopts Darwin’s notion of evolution through adaptation and natural selection, to human social and intellectual development, human history--viewing the motivating drive in human social development as both the desire and the need of human beings to shape the societies (through which they mediate their metabolic relationship with the natural environment) to secure and enhance their lives, individually and collectively.  

Historical materialism’s philosophical stance can be traced to many strands: Greek materialist and epicurian philosophy; radical Christian antinomianism (anti-baptist, egalitarian Christian peasant revolts, Levellers, Diggers, etc.); the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution; romantic poets like Shelley and Heine; French utopian socialist thinkers; pioneering 19th century work on anthropology by researchers like Bachofen (Mother Right) and William Henry Morgan (Ancient Society). 

All these intellectual and spiritual currents, came together in the minds of serious thinkers in Europe faced with the effects of the early industrial revolution: what to make of the power of the new capitalist elite, of the political and social power they wielded through their ownership of incredibly productive (and destructive) machinery, of the social disruption and misery unleashed on the working population. 

Marx wrote Capital as a critique of political economy, but mainly in order to understand how the capitalist system worked--in order to find a way of changing it that would succeed.  He admired the spirit and morality of the anarchists, but not their nihilistic methods. He was Hegelian enough to know that one did not create something new from nothing, but, for better or worse, out of the old, for the old is what we inherit, materially and spiritually. The mind of a child is not a tabula rasa, it is the physical/material potential of the child to absorb the world and come to understand it through the experience of those who have gone before us, and, as circumstances suggest or demand, to imaginatively form something new out of what is still progressive (rather than destructive) in that intellectual and material inheritance. I think it was Istvan Meszaros who first named this dialectical process, out of which history is created,"historical necessity." Certainly there is a dire "historical necessity today.

No one who has read Capital will have missed the footnotes, accounting for what seems to be half of the book. These are full of detailed reports of the actual lives of uprooted people. Capital provides the necessary figures and calculations, but this witnessing of the human costs of industrial capitalism is the heart of Capital, the heart of this heartless, profoundly described and rigorously analyzed, world. Marx condemned mainstream followers of classical political economists like Adam Smith for treating surface market phenomena (and their calculations of “value”) as if they represented eternal forces of nature rather than merely reflecting--and obscuring--historically created, very unequal, social relations. He considered most of the work of their followers to be “vulgar,”  bad-faith apologetics, and not science. They returned, and their modern mainstream followers return the favor, dismissing "marxism" as “history” or “philosophy” or even “religion,” anything but economics. They are wrong. The economics in Capital is profound and rigorous science.  But bourgeois apologists are also right: an unshakable egalitarianism based upon human sympathy is the driving emotional force behind Capital and historical materialism, not cold calculation. 

Primitive accumulation--how industrial capitalism came into being will be taken up next. That will conclude my failed attempt to explicate basic marxism in 100 words or less.

I have to insert one last digression from my attempt to capsulize essential marxism in a few short essays. I hope to complete this task in my next blog, which will cover historical materialism and primitive (primal) accumulation. If you are reading this, thanks for your patience. If not, thanks anyway....          

Tyrone

There had  been two phone messages from Fed Ex that they were holding four dining chairs I had ordered from Overstock.com. We had just driven 300 hot miles northeast from the coast. I was excited to see what the chairs would look like with the oak table we had found at a yard sale and I had sanded and stained. Tired as I was, I decided to go get the chairs before the local Fed Ex store closed.

For the past couple of years my wife and I have met my sister and brother-in-law at one of the beach towns on the coast half-way between Los Angeles (where they lived) and Sacramento. As usual, we talked mostly politics, a grim subject these days for those on the “left,” since the subject has come to revolve about the absence of any effective “left” political movement in the US--or rather, even a proper language with which to analyze the cause of the absence of any politics at all--except the politics of the hegemony of  monopoly financial capital, not only here, but throughout the world. 

My sister and her husband had devoted their lives to labor organizing and political activism. And there I was, sitting in a restaurant chair (though I had done my bit working for civil rights and protesting imperial wars)--repeating the obvious: the industrial working class of the United States lives in China, etc., and we Americans eat courtesy of guest workers mainly from Mexico. Centuries of slavery, racism, and the crumbs of imperial rent have emasculated the average, ethnically divided, American wage earner. Nothing but false consciousness is to be expected from most of them for now, not even the anti-imperialism that basically motivated our generation. We had grown old. My brother-in-law had just retired, and my sister was about to do so. I might as well have told them that they had wasted their lives. Yet I did not think so. I continue to admire them--I suppose, for the same reason that I don’t feel I had wasted more than three decades teaching mainly Afro-American children so that Condoleesa Rice (it would seem) could have an oil tanker named after her. One day that stinking tanker will sink under the sea that floated it. 

The Overstock.com chairs weren’t made in China, they were made in Vietnam. I was stunned, not surprised. It was my particular store of grief evoked by that particular criminal war. Then weakness dressed itself up as irony: should I give up bananas, coffee, underwear? To be honest, the moral miasma I created for myself was a blind that obfuscated good reasons for sending the chairs back, but not my desire to take them home to see what they looked like around the yard sale oak table, which was maybe 100 years old and real oak. These Vietnamese chairs, as I knew, were composed of laminated scraps of oak-finished, tropical wood, processed in high tech factories controlled by the very imperial forces that had murdered millions of the parents of the young people who now had to work for almost nothing in these satanic mills.  

But the price was right: four for $400 rather than about $3000 for real real oak chairs I wouldn’t have to bolt together myself and made in small batches. As far as the business of living and getting by in the United States goes, I’m in the same boat as the patriot across the street running up a flag on Veterans’ Day. Except that his political morality is blindly unproblematic. He looks where he is told to look and sees what he’s told to see. He powerlessly identifies with power. I view my daily existence as a political and moral dilemma.

The woman behind the Fed Ex counter was tiny and wiry, and alone, running around serving customers. She managed to drag my four large, heavy cartons out from somewhere in the back, but I was not going to ask her to load them into my car across the lot. So, respecting the uncertainty of my bulging disks and sciatic feet, I began awkwardly trundling the first carton toward the opened hatch of my “vice Versa”. Then Tyrone called out: Can I help you?

My wife later told me that he had been hanging about Peets for some time with a spray bottle and rags, washing car windows. But I knew Tyrone from a previous encounter a couple of weeks before. It was 6 a.m. and I’d been hobbling along to get us a couple of scones from the local cafe around the corner that had mysteriously started baking good pastries--no more Peets or Starbucks for me! ...Someone called out. --Isn’t this a beautiful morning! I was about to turn my head when Tyrone slowly rolled into view on a decent mountain bike. --Thank the Lord! I am blessed, brother.  And so are you! Isn’t this a beautiful morning! I looked at him carefully. His face was round and brown and smiling and wonderful to behold at at six in the morning. I did feel blessed. I told him so... as he rolled and I strolled toward the intersection. 

Most people live near freeways, Taco Bells, and Rite Aids in Sacramento. There are homeless of every description in our neighborhood, and you cannot expect to go walking about scot-free. So that morning I was wondering if I had some loose dollars in my wallet for Tyrone, as we approached the corner, still sincerely exchanging glad tidings. To me it was clear that Tyrone would have said what he said the way he said it whatever his situation. Nevertheless, his timing was as exquisite as an expert con-artist. The light obediently turned red, and Tyrone said quietly --I’m blessed to wake up and be alive and meet good people like you. ...I could use some money for breakfast. I figured five dollars would be o.k., and he took it graciously.

I don’t think Tyrone remembered me. I insisted on helping him load the cartons, which must have weighed 30 pounds each, but he wouldn’t allow it. He was just happy to help and he didn’t ask for any money, but I handed him two dollars and asked him where his bike was. Stolen he said. (I had three mountain bikes in the garage.) --That’s too bad, I said and mentioned the Bike Kitchen. He said he knew about the place and might try them again. It took a minute to get the cartons on the folded down back seat, and I was impatient to get home. But Tyrone wanted to talk more. Obviously the two dollars were not enough. He asked to wash my windows for a couple of extra dollars. I told him no. I had to go. Actually, I was too tired to stand around while he washed the windows of my car. Tyrone didn’t press the issue, but he wanted to tell me more: about how ill he was, about knees and kidneys. I mentioned a free clinic I knew about. Tyrone knew all about free clinics.  No, he was going to the emergency ward. They’d take care of him. ...Then one last quiet, friendly try: didn’t I have something he could do so he could have some supper?  

I put my hand in my wallet pocket when Tyrone, in way of giving up and saying goodbye, came closer and began to sing--beautifully--a few bars of a spiritual--there, between Fed Ex and Peets, about 3 inches from my face. I was lifted so high out of my nonsense and weariness that I forgot the wallet in my pocket. We shook hands, Tyrone walked back to Peets with, hopefully, more than my two dollars for supper, and I drove home, my spirit lifted, but with a back seat full of grief and stolen labor.

Postscript: Home at last, I ripped one carton apart and blindly convinced myself that the chairs’ color was o.k.  The next morning I tried to bolt the parts together. The directions were quite simple, so I didn’t bother to check the hardware against the illustrated number of parts in the directions. There seemed to be enough of everything, but alignment took some wrestling and the last bolt wouldn’t cinch down, seemingly stripped. I took the chair apart, and checked the hardware against the instruction sheet. There were supposed to be four long bolts and eight short bolts. Somebody had packaged eight long bolts and three short ones. The short bolts were way too short to grab anything but air (and I could find no use for any of them). The long bolts (of which there were many) seemed to work, except in the last hole. 

Could it have been that some eighteen year old worker was sending me a message of human resilience? sort of what Tyrone represented for me? But Tyrone and I had seen each other up close. He could see that (despite my decent pension and nice house that he could certainly have guessed at ) I was far from being the enemy. Quite the contrary. Nor would anything he didn’t know have made any difference to him: we were, in good faith, playing the fool together at this point in time, in this social situation. 

I hope some eighteen year old worker sabotaged my chairs. If she did, it would have been an act of audacity and defiance and proof of the resilience of the Vietnamese people. If so, I hope the defiance (if that’s what the screwed up bolts represented) was not directed at privileged victims (or our common enemy) like me. Rather, I hope and believe, that as a daughter of a revolutionary people now brought to their knees, she--and a host of others like her--intended to create disruptions along the chain of profit growing from the theft and misuse of their labor. They have nothing to lose by such audacity, nor did I. I sent the chairs back.

I hope Overstock.com lives up to its name, when all the factories and land in Vietnam are re-occupied by its workers. That might wake workers in the US to the real price of our illusions, and inspire them to come out on the streets and occupy all our public spaces, especially our bailed-out banks.  That will take the courage and audacity of the Vietnamese. And also, the love and wile of spiritual troubadours like Tyrone.

Amen.