Date: Mon, 04 Aug 1997 08:35:38 +0100
From: Chris Burford <cburford-AT-gn.apc.org>
Subject: M-I: Marxist history and counterfactuals.


At 04:00 PM 8/3/97 -0400, Andrew wrote:
>Comrades,
>
>This "what-if" question is so difficult as to perhaps not be practical? 
>The causes of the revolution are so complex that reduction to a single or
>a few causes seems to me to be impossible. Could the Revolution have
>happened had this person not been around? if this historical conjuncture
>had not happened when it did? if the revolutionary mass did not possess
>this character at this time? Maybe. Maybe not. 


This type of question has been christened a "counter-factual".

A book has recently been published promoting this theme. One of the
chapters is what would have happened if Hitler had beaten Stalin.

In promoting the book the author criticised EH Carr for marxist determinism
in ruling out the legitimacy of such questions. I do not know if this is
really fair to EH Carr but I think such questions are legitimate. Some
decisive historical events are damn fine run things. They are on a cusp. 

In the case of the October Revolution I think it is reasonable to say what
if there had been no one in the Bolshevik leadership to argue the April
Theses the October Revolution would not have occurred. He was in a minority
of one in the Bolshevik leadership about Brest Litovsk, and gradually won
them all round.If Lenin had not won the majority over to declare the
revolution, again it would not have occurred.

 Lenin does not have to be regarded as always correct, to be seen as
brilliant.  His model of democratic centralism was one in which, it is
important to consider, all members of the central committee could think for
themselves in the way he could. Had his strokes developed ten years earlier
or ten years later the history of the revolution and of the 20th century
might well have been different.

The theoretical basis for this type of argument does not seem to me to go
against a fundamental marxist view about the tendency of the superstructure
to be affected by the economic base. It is compatible with chaos theory,
which recognises that while some patterns have a momentum and a regularity
about them, chaotic changes can sometimes occur that are dependent on
"initial conditions". But as there is no single start to human history,
"initial conditions" are the particularity of each concrete situation which
sets the conditions for the next step.

On the other hand, with apologies to Doug Henwood, I cannot quite agree
with the rhetorical question posed by James Grant, Editor of "Grant's
Interest Rate Observer", on the back of Doug's new book "Wall Street":

"If Karl Marx wrote as well as Doug Henwood, who knows what course history
might have taken?"



Chris Burford
London.





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