Subversión y moraleja

As you enter a bookshop in the UK, the first thing the new visitor is likely to notice is the distinction between fiction and non-fiction on the shelves, a distinction that seems to be based on the closeness of a piece of writing to ‘reality.’ We are unlikely to find any history books in the fiction section, but why should this be the case? Who created the division between myth and history and for what reason? ‘Post-ist’ thinking since the 1960s and what has been called the ‘linguistic turn’ shifted worries about whether the mind and its ideas represent reality appropriately to the problem of how language represents reality through discourse. This shift posed a challenge to the 19th century belief that some sort of empiricism was the proper basis or the practice of professional history, and that the works of the historian had the status of an epistemology, i.e. that historians possed certain empirical methods by which they could have objective and demonstrable knowledge of the ‘pas...

Rather than seeing Marx’s additions to Hegel’s ethereal understanding of the driving forces of history as a mere substitution of the ‘x’ in the equation, i.e. changing the Hegelian Geist for the Marxist forces of production, this essay argues that, as Hegel said of Kant’s philosophy in relation to his own, Hegel’s philosophy constituted for Marx not just a basis but a point of departure for his own philosophy. Hence, Marx not only added materiality to Hegel’s philosophy but in many ways went beyond it, as the case study of Marx’s Eighteenth of Brumaire will show. Hegel giving a lecture But let’s start with a basic outline of Hegel’s philosophy, especially his view of history and its driving forces. The importance of history for Hegel resides on his understanding of reality not as a given state of affairs but as a historical process of perpetual change. The driving force behind this historical process is the ethereal, ambiguous and much-debated Geist (mind/spirit), which is th...

Andrej Grubacic’s and Staughton Lynd’s Wobblies and Zapatistas is a different kind of history book. Being a conversation between both, the main text is formed by Lynd’s answers to Grubacic’s questions, in which the former reflects on his trajectory as an activist and civil rights lawyer in the US. It is a form of oral history, in which Lynd draws from his personal experience to answer Grubacic’s questions, and in doing so creates a historical narrative of his time. Although many times confusing due to its lack of a single narrative and Lynd’s multiple digressions, the book is innovative because the historian (Grubacic) gives voice to the historical subject (Lynd in this case) with only partial guidance; Grubacic leads the conversation by choosing the questions, but it is Lynd who ultimately has the last word. This is the complete opposite to what is common in most historical accounts, in which the historian is the only writing authority. Moreover, Grubacic’s intention is not to portr...