WRITING BIOGRAPHY AS
A MARXIST:
THE INDIVIDUAL AND
THE SOCIAL IN CHILDE’S LIFE
Terry Irving
[This is an extract from a talk delivered by Terry Irving as an invited
guest to the Biography Workshop of the Australian National University, 26
August, 2021.]
While Childe was alive, the prevailing Marxist view of biography was that it was a bourgeois artform, written by dilletantes focussing gratefully on the genius of the individual artist or scientist or statesman while anxiously averting their gaze from the collapse of capitalist culture.
Underpinning this critique was a determinist version of
Marxism. This mechanical or scientific Marxism was a Second International
orthodoxy that had been codified during the Third International by the
Stalinists in the 1930s and 40s. Under its sway, among Marxist intellectuals in
the communist world, historical forces occupied the terrain of explanation to
the exclusion of mere individuals.
Mechanical Marxism failed to see that if ‘social being’
determines consciousness, this is true only at the most general level of the
class structure. This theorem – that social being is determining - defines what
a capitalist is, and it defines also what a proletarian is in relation to the
capitalist, but it does not define the individuality of any particular member
of either of those classes. Ditto for intermediate classes, or sub-classes, or
persons outside the class structure.
Similarly, hegemonic masculinity is for most men in
capitalist society an aspect of their social being. But it does not define the
particular sexuality of an individual man.
Childe was never
persuaded by either of these generalised accounts of social relations and
cultural hegemony. What was important to Childe was the mutual constitution of
the individual and the social world in which they lived. In his last book he
put it like this: ‘In acting, men do not act on Reality, but participate in the
activity that is Reality.’[1]
Since Childe’s death it has become feasible for Marxists to
write biography as Marxists because they have given up on two
obsessions. The first is the obsession with writing about the structural
conditions in which social life occurs. The simple fact is: that this made
biography impossible because it made a separated, individual life into an illusion.
The second is the search for ‘the Marxist theory of biography’. For some
orthodox Marxists this became an obsession. Julian Roche has recently written
about the attempt by the French Marxist, Lucien Sève, to ground Marxist
biography in a Marxist theory of individuality in which man is seen as a being
who produces himself in social labour.[2] Roche argues that no one
could fulfil all the criteria for such a ‘social labour’ biography: every
social relation and issue of production, class and culture would have to be
taken into account as part of the analysis of every decision, opinion and
action of the individual. Roche concludes that a Marxist biography is
impossible. We can, however, still have biographies written by Marxists,
biographies connecting the individual with their social context.
My response is that social context is so broad a term as to
mean almost nothing. Roche suggests that biographies written by Marxists might
have a family resemblance to ‘social biography’, and to ‘cultural-historical biography’.
Social biography was the term coined in 1937 by the critical German Marxist,
Siegfried Kracauer.[3]
The term was taken up recently by the American labour historian, Nick Salvatore
to describe his own approach to biography. Social biography is rich in data,
evoking a life in motion, a biography in which ‘the particular is the prism
that reveals social as well as personal meaning.’[4] Personally, I don’t find
that helpful at all. What does he mean by ‘social’? Other individuals, or
particular collective movements, or abstract social forces such as
globalisation or networked communication? Turning to cultural-historical
theory: this was the term invented by the Soviet (but anti-Stalinist)
developmental psychologist, and Marxist, L.S. Vygotsky to describe his theory
that psychological development was historically shaped and culturally
transmitted.[5]
But this time, one must ask: shaped by what historical forces and how
transmitted?
So, can we be any more precise? I’ve been reading Michael
Heinrich’s Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society, which was
published in English in 2019, the first volume of his multi-volume biography of
Marx. There is an appendix to this volume, ‘How is Biographical Writing
Possible Today? On the Methodology of a Marx Biography’. Heinrich, a scholar of
Marx’s economics and for many years the managing editor in Germany of the
Marxist PROKLA: Journal of Critical Social Science, has written a
surprisingly conventional biography. After 136 pages, we have just got to the
point where young Karl has taken his final high school exam, destined for
university with his head full of literature and art, with ‘not yet any
intimation of the future revolutionary, socialist theorist.’[6] The discussion in the
preceding pages is about equally divided between the Marx and von Westphalen
families, on the one hand, and the history of the city (Trier)and its region
(the Rhineland), the situation of the Jews, the class relations and political
conditions in Prussia, the educational system and so on, on the other.
Gradually, Marx himself appears, with social bonds and private impetuses,
making friends, writing poetry and dancing.
Thus develops in Heinrich’s hands a very immediate sense of
Marx’s ‘social being’. We are introduced to a very particular set of institutions,
a very specific borderland culture, and a very intimate account of relations
between persons. It is not that the abstractions forming the Marxist point of
view – for example the class structure, the competition between states, the
revolutionary movement of the early 19th century - are absent, but
they are brought closer to Marx’s domestic situation than we might expect if
this were ‘a Marxist biography’ instead of a biography written by a Marxist.[7]
In his appendix on the methodology of biography, Heinrich’s
set out his core principle: that biography is not just concerned with
‘understanding’ a person, because a person is not ‘a fixed unity’, but the
outcome of ‘a permanent process of social constitution occurring at different
levels.’ So, it is important not to imagine the individual and the social as
being situated on opposite sides of a divide, because that would prevent ‘a
mutual process of constitution’:
‘The “historical world”
contributes essentially to what constitutes the individual, who can only
experience this constitution in actions, communications, and relations,
whereby it also affects the “historical world”. This means that “acting” and
“reacting” occur simultaneously in most cases, albeit with different degrees of
consequences at different times. In many biographies, however, this “acting”
upon the individual and the individual’s “reaction” in society are temporally
separated. In other words, [in these defective biographies] the person is
formed by external influences, [and] then this finished
person reacts in the external world and experiences success or setbacks.’ [8] [my emphasis in italics]
The important point I draw from Heinrich is that because the
subject experiences the historical world personally, the biographer therefore
looks for traces of history in the actions of the subject. Heinrich at one
point uses the phrase ‘network of effects’ to describe his idea of the person
who is the subject of a biography: ‘These effects are not only changeable in
time; they are at least in part the result of the actions of the person being
considered.’[9]
The subject is making history as well as being made by it.
So if, as Ray Monk want us to do, we are talking about
‘connections’, we can understand these as the moments of intersection between
subject and history in a mutually constituted network of effects.
In The Fatal Lure of Politics, this was also my
approach, although as I’ve told you it was almost instinctive. I knew that I
had to write a biography in which Childe’s political life was central. I could
see that he shared his life with a global history of imperialist wars and
communist revolution, and that throughout his life he was conscious of their
effects on him. So, without too much thought about what I was doing, I looked
particularly for the clearest moments of connection between history and self to
highlight both the history and his personal reactions. Let me remind you of a
few of them.
Consider his opposition to the First World War. His analysis
of the origins of the war were not unique on the left. It was based on Hobson’s
theory of imperialism. He also accepted the view among the anti-war Marxists
that only proletarian victory in the class war would prevent future wars among
the capitalist powers. But the distinctive aspects of his opposition were very
personal. He hated the war’s damage to ‘civilisation’, as learning, and
truthfulness in public life, retreated, and as the power of the state advanced.
He hated the killing of working men while capitalists made super profits. He
hated the state’s punishment of men claiming the right of conscience to justify
refusal to support the war. His opposition was passionate, truculent and in
terms of his career, ill-considered. It was as if his impulse was to defend the
right to be different because, in some basic way, he too was different.
In his mid-twenties, Childe found that he had to earn a
living, so now we have to understand his life in the context of the relations
of production. Childe was an intellectual worker. His first jobs - in the
public service, in worker education, as a private secretary, and as a
librarian, permitted almost no intellectual creativity. He made sure he was a
member of the appropriate union as he performed the dull and routine tasks (as
he described them) associated with these jobs. Later, as a professor he would
have greater freedom, but he still thought of himself as a worker, which
explains his leadership role in the Association of Scientific Workers, a trade
union for laboratory workers and an advocacy organisation for supporters of the
social responsibility of science, and the role of science in undermining
fascist ideas and contributing to progressive education.
With academic freedom came a new responsibility. As an
intellectual worker he operated within institutions that sanctioned both
development and critique of the dominant ideology. In the early twentieth
century Childe was surrounded by signs of a crisis in bourgeois thought as
liberal individualism came to terms with a collectivist age. In both philosophy
and politics, Childe chose very distinctive paths.
In philosophy, idealism was challenging English empiricism,
but Childe was not impressed by either of them. Instead, as Dutt said, Childe
took ‘the classic royal road through Hegel’ to Marxism, a road that led him
away from the economic reductionism and mechanical materialism of orthodox
Second International and Soviet Marxism and towards what we now call Western
Marxism.[10] We see this most clearly in his rejection of
historical explanations in history that involve transcendental and universal
laws and his insistence instead that history is a story of humankind’s capacity
for novelty and creativity.
In political ideology, as the juggernaut of statism rolled
through parliamentary, communist and fascist regimes – Childe called it
totalitarianism – he retained his early faith in pluralist and popular
democratic solutions that he had adopted while in Australia.
Childe chose archaeology as his field of professional
expertise, a field where he found a practice that continually reinforced a
materialist philosophy. The history of civilisation could be built up from the
record of tools and material objects and history itself was essentially the
history of production. Focussing on that field of practice, we might be tempted
to think of his ‘social being’ - in its most immediate sense - as determined by
archaeology – as a discipline, as a network of practitioners, as a basis for
historical knowledge.
It is certainly true that Childe made a major contribution
to archaeology, but if we ask where archaeology sat in his individual
consciousness the answer is plain. It sat within his Marxism. He was a Marxist
before he was an archaeologist, and from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s he
was preoccupied with the project of using the data of archaeology to provide a
scientific basis for the Marxist theory of history. I came to understand this
point biographically, or to be more theoretical, by looking for the
intersections between his ‘social being’ and individual consciousness. It is not
a truth that historians of archaeology could easily discover because for them
the question is always: what part did Marxism play in Childe’s archaeology.
And for the archaeologists during Childe’s lifetime, Marxism
meant a determinist and mechanical form of historical materialism, in which
economic base determined the intellectual and cultural superstructure. But
always for Childe they were mutually constitutive.
Before leaving this matter, there is one question about
Childe’s individuality that requires our attention: what was Childe’s sexual
orientation? My book allows the reader to infer that he was homosexual, and I
draw that conclusion too, but I also admit that there is no evidence in
Childe’s life of a homosexual lifestyle or relationship. I suggest the reasons
for this absence were Childe’s fear of prosecution (since engaging in
homosexual acts was a criminal offence during his lifetime), or his preference
for the intimacy of non-sexual friendships, or a mix of both. Whatever the
reason, it is clear that as far as the sexual aspect of his life is concerned,
that Childe never conformed to hegemonic masculinity, that he resisted one of
the kinds of social being available to most men, sublimating his sexuality in
work.
I wrote the book identifying with Childe, but not, I hope,
uncritically. But the greater danger is not its possible lack of critical
distance but its exclusion or displacement of vital parts of his life because
of my authorial needs. Has that happened in Fatal Lure, and if so, how
damaging has it been to my book’s claim to demonstrate biographical
objectivity?
Childe was the most famous archaeologist and prehistorian of
his day, so why does Fatal Lure devote so little space to his life as an
archaeologist? This is a matter that has disappointed a few reviewers. My
response is that it all depends what you mean by archaeology. In an article
written near the end of his life, Childe wrote:
The most original and useful
contributions that I may have made to prehistory are certainly not novel data
rescued by brilliant excavation from the soil or by patient research from dusty
museum cases, nor yet well founded chronological schemes nor freshly defined
cultures, but rather interpretative concepts and methods of explanation.[11]
Fatal Lure does deal with his ground-breaking concept
of the ‘two revolutions’ in prehistory, and it does discuss his contribution to
the Marxist method of historical explanation. If his publications on historical
materialism between 1935 and 1952, including the two books that made him the
most famous archaeologist of his day, Man Makes Himself (1936) and What
Happened in History (1942), are regarded as not serious contributions to
archaeology, that is archaeology’s problem not mine. In fact, I say to
archaeologists, now that my book has established the centrality of politics in
Childe’s life, that they should consider his life as an archaeologist with
fresh eyes. If I were a trained archaeologist, that is what I would do. I don’t
consider that Fatal Lure displaces Childe’s contribution to archaeology,
but it does require complementary studies of the discipline of archaeology from
workers in that field.
It has been clear to most reviewers that Fatal Lure
is a book about me as well as Childe. Early in the book I register the several
ways in which Childe’s story and mine have intersected, and I remember most
clearly the feeling of relief that came with my decision to write about that
intersection. As I approach the end of my life, I contemplate with ever greater
urgency Childe’s circumstances and thinking in the months before he died. ‘A
sane society’, he wrote in his suicide note, would offer ‘euthanasia as a
crowning honour’.[12]
[1]
V.G. Childe, Society and Knowledge, George Allen and Unwin, London,
1956, p. 128.
[2]
Julian Roche, ‘Can Biography Benefit from a Marxist Theory of Individuality?
Lucien Sève’s Contribution to Biographical Theory and Practice’, Rethinking Marxism,
vol. 30 (2) 2018, pp. 291-306.
[3]
Michael Heinrich, Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of
Marx and the Development of his Work, Volume 1: 1818-1841, Monthly Review
Books, NY, 2019, p. 400.
[4]
Nick Salvatore, ‘Biography and Social History: an Intimate Relationship’, Labour
History, number 87, November 2004, pp. 187, 189.
[5]
Danling Fu, ‘Vygotsky and Marxism’, Education
and Culture, Spring,
1997 Vol. XIV No. 1, pp. 10-17.
[6]
Michael Heinrich, Karl Marx, p. 136.
[7]
As an aside, the opposite approach to biography written by Marxists can be seen
in Dona Torr’s Tom Mann and His Times, Volume 1, Lawrence and Wishart,
London, 1956, in which Mann is placed in a general history of the formation of
the English working class. Dona Torr was a committed Marxist-Leninist and a
member of the Communist Party’s History Group, but she had no influence on the
‘history from below’ methods that were to make the Group famous.
[8]
Heinrich, Karl Marx, p. 410.
[9]
Heinrich, Karl Marx, p. 412.
[10]
R.P. Dutt, letter to The Times (London), 24 October 1957.
[11]
V. Gordon Childe, ‘Retrospect’, Antiquity, xxxii, 1958, p. 69.
[12]
V.G. Childe to F.W. Grimes, 20 October 1957, enclosing the suicide note that
G.E. Daniels published in Antiquity, 54, 1980, pp. 2-3.
