Hobsbawm: On History

A friend and colleague, Dave, appeared in my office on Friday to show me this description of a talk being given here at Cornell on colonialism and Okinawa. Dave is studying Japan and thought he ought to go to the talk, but the description made him wary. He and I like to talk about economics, politics and history, and bemoan and mock postmodern twaddle. Some of the problems with this pitch are obviously related to translation. Even so, it made it onto the Cornell Events calendar as is, and no doubt students and professors attended.

Thinking about Colonialism from Okinawa

–– Between Decolonization and Cold War ––

Okinawan modern history has been constructed in terms of territorial sovereignty and has been narrated as colonialism in terms of its occupation and deprivation of sovereignty. In this context, the acquisition of territorial sovereignty is posited as the main project of Okinawan liberation. However, I propose that thinking about colonialism in Okinawa entails critically examining thought rooted on assumptions about territory. It is decisively important to understand colonialism as the problem of capitalism in order to examine above. The movement of capital continues to create an indefinable indeterminacy (deterritorialization) against territories and nations, those of which are defined by sovereignty. Then, such indeterminacy comes to be immediately determined again as a new territory or nation. However, at the same time, I have to point out that we can also find there are possibilities to disengage one’s body from the movement of capital. This is why traces of capital engraved in Empire are able to emerge as a dream for liberation that cannot be collapsed into territorial sovereignty between decolonization accompanied with the collapse of empires and formation of the Cold War system. Also, in my presentation, I will examine the concept of lumpenproletariat as these problems above.

I can’t bear to rip this apart. It moves from Hegelian abstraction to surreal free association. On the face of it, the notion that colonialism is an invention of capitalism is ludicrous. It hurt Edward Said when he ignored Mongol, Chinese, Turkish, Persian, Greek and Roman colonialism. To say that colonialism takes a specific form under capitalism, and that over the history of capitalism colonialism and the nation state have evolved or changed is fine. But it is possible to write about change, and the dialectics of change coherently. In history, style and content are inseparable. That is why there is a muse of history and not of sociology.

It happens that this weekend I picked up a wonderful book of essays by the great English historian Eric Hobsbawm. It was given to me by my aunt Doris, a Marxist, a member of the Communist Party, and a professor of literature and women’s studies. Doris and her husband, a theoretical physicist, are committed radicals. They travel regularly to Cuba, Vietnam and China. They represent a world rapidly vanishing and I cherish their commitments and beliefs even when I don’t share them. She is also a Baker Street Irregular. Doris is firmly in the empirical school of English Marxism. Hobsbawm, along with Christopher Hill, EP Thompson and Raymond Williams (among others) represent the best of Marxist scholarship. Here, to offset the taste of the above quote, is Hobsbawm giving a talk in 1970 entitled Has History Made Progress:

First, the time is ripe to turn again to the transformations of humankind, which is the major question of history. And, incidentally, to ask why the entire itinerary from hunter-gatherers to modern industrial society was completed in only one region of the world and not in others. Once historians recognize that this is a common and central problem, which concerns students of medieval coronation rituals as much as those of the origins of the Cold War, they can contribute to it within the range of their special interests. They might even extend the range of their subject on rational or at least operational grounds rather than haphazardly. Fortunately there is evidence that at least one large and crucial sector of the problem is once again debated as such a common concern by other than Marxist historians, mainly the historical origin and development of capitalism….

Second, there is the central question of how things fit together. I don’t mean by this where the major mechanisms of historical change and transformation are to be found, for this is already implicit in my first big problem. I mean rather the mode of interaction between different aspects of human life, between say economics, politics, family and sexual relations, culture in the wide or narrow sense, or sensibility. It is patent that in nineteenth-century Europe, which has been my main field, all these things are determined by the triumph of the capitalist economy, or at any rate cannot possibly be analyzed without seeing this as the central fact. But it is also clear that the triumph of this economy, even in its core regions, operated on and through the products of past history. It destroyed and created some things, but more often it adapted, co-opted and modified what was already there. Indeed, if you look at it from another perspective—say that of Japan in the 1860s—a pre-existing society might see itself as adapting and co-opting capitalism as a way to keep itself viable. For this reason simple determinism or functionalism will not do.

Finally, from the preface to the book this essay is published in (‘On History’) a defense of reality:

First, about telling the truth about history….I strongly defend the view that what historians investigate is real. The point from which historians must start, however far from it they might end, is the fundamental and, for them, absolutely central distinction between establishable fact and fiction, between historical statements based on evidence and subject to evidence and those which are not.

It has become fashionable in recent decades, not least among people who think of themselves as on the left, to deny that objective reality is accessible, since what we call ‘facts’ exist only as a function of prior concepts and problems formulated in terms of these. The past we study is only a construct of our minds. One construct is in principle as valid as another, whether it can be backed by logic and evidence or not. So long as it forms part of an emotionally strong system of beliefs, there is, as it were, no way in principle of deciding that the biblical account of the creation of the earth is inferior to one proposed by the natural sciences: they are just different. Any tendency to doubt this is ‘positivism’, and no term indicates a more comprehensive dismissal than this, unless it is empiricism.

In short, I believe that without the distinction between what is and what is not so, there can be no history….