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For Marx, but with Reservations About Althusser: A Comment on Bernstein and Depelchin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Robin Law
Robin Law*
Affiliation:
University of Stirling
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Extract

The 1970s have seen the growing influence of Marxism in the field of African history, with both the application of the neo-Marxist theory of “underdevelopment” to the study of the impact of international capitalism upon Africa and the employment of the more orthodox Marxist categories of “relations of production” and “mode of production” to the analysis of the indigenous social formations of Africa. The appearance in this journal of the programmatic article by Henry Bernstein and Jacques Depelchin, arguing for the development of a Marxist history of Africa, is therefore no surprise. It is, however, something of a disappointment, inasmuch as “Marxism” is peddled by Bernstein and Depelchin in a form particularly unhelpful to historians. Like Hindess and Hirst,” the ostensible inspirers of much Marxist work on African history, Bernstein and Depelchin subscribe to a particular variant of Marxism, that associated with the French philosopher Louis Althusser. While Marx should certainly be made welcome in the field of African history, since he has a great deal of interest to say on the crucial question of the relationship between economic, political, and ideological developments, it is less clear that Althusser is his most useful interpreter.

Since Bernstein and Depelchin consistently emphasize the “radical break” which supposedly exists between Marxism, represented by themselves, and “bourgeois [i.e. non-Marxist] social thought” (1979: 31; cf. 1978:2) it is first of all necessary to consider the question: who is a Marxist? Many of the features which Bernstein and Depelchin, following Althusser, present as being distinctive of Marxism would, in fact, be contested by others equally claiming to be Marxists.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 8 , 1981 , pp. 247 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1981

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References

NOTES

1. For example, see the review article by Legassick, Martin, “Perspectives on African ‘Undervelopment’,” JAH, 17(1976), 435–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. See for example the review article by Law, Robin, “In Search of a Marxist Perspective on Pre-Colonial Tropical Africa,” JAH, 19(1978), 441–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Bernstein, Henry and Depelchin, Jacques, “The Object of African History: A Materialist Perspective,” History in Africa, 5(1978), 1–19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; 6(1979), 17-43. Henceforth this is cited in parentheses in the text.

4. See especially Hindess, Barry and Hirst, Paul Q., Precapitalist Modes of Production (London, 1975)Google Scholar; also idem and idem, Mode of Production and Social Formation: An Autocritique of ‘Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production’ (London, 1977).

5. I write “ostensible” because it is often difficult to see how work supposedly inspired by Hindess and Hirst really represents an application of their theories. For example the very useful study of the material basis of political authority among the Lozi by Clarence-Smith, W.G., “Slaves, Commoners and Landlords in Bulozi, c. 1875 to 1906,” JAH, 20(1979), 219–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cites the work of Hindess and Hirst as an inspiration, but it is difficult to identify any serious attempt to apply their theories to the analysis of Lozi society (e.g. by demonstrating that the relations of production correspond to a determinate set of forces of production, or that the political and ideological superstructures can be interpreted as conditions of existence of the mode of production).

6. See especially Althusser, Louis, For Marx (London, 1977)Google Scholar; Althusser, and Balibar, Etienne, Reading Capital (London, 1970).Google Scholar

7. E.g. in the classic formulation in the Preface to Marx's, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, first published in 1859.Google Scholar

8. See the recent expositions by Shaw, William H., Marx's Theory of History (London, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Cohen, G.A., Karl Marx's Theory of History (Oxford, 1978).Google Scholar

9. See for example Fleischer, Helmut, Marxism and History (New York, 1973).Google Scholar

10. Marx, and Engels, , The German Ideology in Collected Works (12 vols.: London, 1976), 5:37.Google Scholar

11. Thompson, E.P., The Poverty of Theory (London, 1979).Google Scholar

12. Bernstein and Depelchin are not altogether consistent in this, since at one point (1979: 28) they appear to adopt the much more plausible view that history provides “a field of ‘facts’ … to which the concepts and methods of social analysis are applied,” which presumably means that the same “facts” are available for analysis through different conceptual frameworks.

13. See the translator's glossary (approved by Althusser himself) included in For Marx and Reading Capital.

14. Thus Althusεer argues that Engels misunderstood and distorted Marx's theories, and Hindess and Hirst have rejected those texts of Marx and Engels which attempt to delinate an “Asiatic mode of production.”

15. The German Ideology, in Collected Works, 5:31.Google Scholar

16. Lenin, V.I., What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight the Social Democrats (Moscow, 1970), 14.Google Scholar

17. They argue that “Vansina's evidence fails to support his proposition” (1979: 26).Google Scholar

18. Hegel, G.W.F., Reason in History, trans. Hartman, R.S. (New York, 1933), 13.Google Scholar

19. See Peel, J.D.Y., “Two Cheers for Empiricism,” Sociology, 12(1978), 354.Google Scholar

20. Hindess, and Hirst, , Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, 1–5, 320–23.Google Scholar

21. For those interested in doing so, I would draw attention to the extremely interesting anthology of texts recently published by Progress Publishers: Marx, and Engels, , Pre-Capitalist Socio-Economic Formations (Moscow, 1979).Google Scholar