The Hegemony of Marxist History

The hegemonic account of modern history makes the West the villain. That is why the mob shouts for "decolonization." (1,200 words, 6 minutes)

Marxism is the hegemonic ideology. That bare statement will be greeted with indignant denial by the left, and recognized as obvious by the rest of us.

That chasm of mutual incomprehension, the distance between those who deny and those who understand an obvious apperception, is symptomatic of our present distempers.

One need look no further than “Decolonization,” the slogan of the moment. Professors of polysyllabic things explain, with an air of unflinching, hard-eyed realism, and from the security of the faculty lounge, that decolonization is not a dinner party. Morally proud and vicariously bombastic, this is easy to mock. But the worldview behind these comfortable revolutionaries, the worldview that makes the slogan of “decolonization” comprehensible, indeed morally necessary, has no effective competitors. This worldview sees the West as history’s villain, oppressing the brown and the colonized around the globe. The decolonizers, and there are many, are unaware of other legitimate ways of thinking about history.

The worldview posited by “decolonization” holds that Western civilization has spent the last 500 years colonizing the rest of the world for its economic benefit. It is an ideology that is not necessarily Marxist, but that is congruent with Marxism, is most powerfully and most famously propounded by Marxists, and whose most sophisticated expositions have been written by Marxists. The greatest, and certainly one of the most learned, theorists and exponents of this view was the American Immanuel Wallerstein, author of The Modern World System, in four volumes, the first of which was published in 1974.¹ Wallerstein was a sociologist, but nonetheless, a writer of clarity, whose prose has its rewards, sharp and pointed.

Wallerstein linked the rise of Western mercantile empires, originally the Portuguese and the Dutch, to the Spanish extraction of gold from Latin America and changes in European agriculture from the Middle Ages forward. The British and the French came in later on, in subsequent centuries. Wallerstein is less interested in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than in the earlier period, and I found his final nineteenth-century volume disappointing. But any work surveying so much can be quibbled with on something. Wallerstein’s central point was that the capitalist world system created our world and that this is not a good thing. He articulated and shaped a view, a historical ideology, that many wanted to hear, and that now has no effective rivals.

Marxists like Wallerstein have a single overarching and all-encompassing master narrative, and that is a great advantage to them. Humans love stories, and the Marxists have a compelling one, loaded with moral import. Their story is easily summarized — the capitalist West colonizes for profit — and its moral upshot cannot be mistaken. If that summary comes at some cost to nuance, that is an advantage more than compensated for by its moral clarity. Mobs running in streets shouting about “decolonization” and “land back” want simplicity, not precision.

Keith Thomas, a highly respected historian of early modern England, reviewed Wallerstein’s first volume in that temple of intellectuality, The New York Review of Books. Under the title “Jumbo History,” Thomas wrote that, “it is not clear what other [non-Marxist] organizing principle for history on this scale is available.”² That is exactly the point, and that is what I mean when I say that Marxism is hegemonic. It presents the only available master narrative.

I can name (and no doubt Thomas could too) right off the bat two such organizing master narratives that are very un-Marxist, and that might be used to narrate and to explain the rise of the West to global dominance, using the same (very) large set of facts employed by Wallerstein: one would be a Whiggish story of the progressive rise of the West, ending in the grant of self-rule to the colonies in the expectation that they too will turn into social democracies. A version of that narrative featured until recently in standard book club selections like Will Durant’s Story of Civilization, and in every History-200 Plato-to-NATO textbook, and is not so different from that found in the empirically impeccable Cambridge History of the British Empire, dating to the 1930s.

Another possible but less well-known master narrative would be a cyclic story of rise and decline, with the West rising to global dominance in the nineteenth century, peaking at the beginning of the twentieth, and then its power imploding, along with its self-confidence. Such a story would invite comparison with other great civilizations, à la Toynbee, and would also lend itself to Gibbonian irony.

But these two alternative master narratives are not really available: the former, a story of Western progress, would be greeted with outrage in today’s academy, in the press, and in DEI departments everywhere. The word “racist” would be used with more than the usual abandon. The narrative of progress exists today only to be deconstructed.

The latter cyclic narrative is more to my taste. It works better with the precipitous decline of Western power and self-confidence over the past century, a macroscopic fact that fits into Marxist and Whiggish narratives only as something of an afterthought. But an ironic perspective alive to unintended consequences is unsuited to the needs of ideologues, let alone of mobs. Any such ironist would be unlikely to get tenure, and his conclusions would make poor slogans.

I have used in my title the term hegemony, and in Gramsci’s famous phrase, the hegemonic ideology forms the common sense of an age. The Marxist view of history has become our common sense; dissenters are regarded as outrageous, or at best peculiar. That the Marxist narrative lacks serious politically (never mind academically) tenable competitors speaks to the completeness of its victory.

It is not — of course — that Wallerstein caused the current hegemony of Marxist history. If anything, it is the other way around: the emergent hegemony of a Marxist or Marxisant worldview presented the opportunity for a learned scholar to work up an ambitious large-scale historical orthodoxy congruent with, and meeting the needs of, that emerging hegemony. That his history found an audience speaks of the existence of a readership ready to accept it, even to purchase it, if not in all cases to read it. That a kind of scholarly cottage industry, complete with a peer-reviewed journal of World Systems Research, grew up in homage to Wallerstein reiterates its congeniality to the times. The reasons for Marxist hegemony are several, and will include the political and psychic needs of the intelligentsia — the social base of Marxism in our society — and also the economic structure (Marxists are not wrong about everything) of our increasingly bureaucratic and statist society.

But my point here is that mobs shouting in the streets, like politicians placating or exploiting them, take their slogans from the hegemonic ideology. That ideology has like most ideologies an intellectual articulation, in this case a very sophisticated one, as well as more demotic forms. Its hegemony presents the West as history’s villain, and we lack any competing vision. The West has in its senescence produced a vision of history that celebrates, even advocates, its own decline: There is material here for an ironist, or perhaps better a tragedian.

Self-hatred has been elevated to the status of a world-historical ideology. That self-hatred presents an intellectual problem, and also today a very practical one.

1. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, 2011 (1974).

2. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/04/17/jumbo-history/