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<i>What Might Have Been: [[Imaginary ]] History from 12 Leading Historians</i> ed. Andrew Roberts.

Why is the flourishing genre of ‘what if?’ [[histories]] the preserve of [[conservative]] [[historians]]? The introduction to such volumes typically begins with an attack on [[Marxists]], who allegedly believe in [[historical determinism]]. Take this latest instalment, edited by Andrew Roberts, who has himself contributed an essay on the bright prospects that would have faced [[Russia]] in the 20th century had [[Lenin]] been shot on arriving at the Finland Station. One of Roberts’s arguments in favour of this kind of history is that ‘anything that has been condemned by Carr, Thompson and Hobsbawm must have something to recommend it.’ He believes that the ideals of [[liberté]], [[égalité]], [[fraternité]] ‘have [[time ]] and again been shown to be completely mutually exclusive’. ‘If,’ he continues, ‘we accept that there is no such [[thing ]] as historical inevitability and that [[nothing ]] is preordained, [[political ]] lethargy – one of the scourges of our day – should be banished, since it means that in [[human ]] affairs anything is possible.’

This is [[empirically]] not the [[case]]. Roberts ignores the central [[ideological]] [[paradox]] of [[modern]] [[history]], as formulated by [[Max Weber]] in <em>[[The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism]].</em> In contrast to [[Catholicism]], which conceived of human redemption as [[being ]] dependent on [[good ]] deeds, [[Protestantism]] insisted on [[predestination]]: why then did [[Protestantism]] function as the [[ideology]] of early [[capitalism]]? Why did [[people]]’s [[belief]] that their redemption had been decided in advance not only not lead to lethargy, but sustain the most powerful mobilisation of human resources ever experienced?

The [[conservative]] sympathies of the ‘what if?’ volumes become clear as soon as you look at their [[contents ]] pages. The topics tend to concern how much better history would have been if some revolutionary or ‘radical’ [[event ]] had been avoided (if Charles I had won the Civil War; if the [[English ]] had won the war against the American colonies; if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War; if Germany had won the Great War) or, less often, how much worse history would have been if it had taken a more progressive turn. There are two examples of the latter in Roberts’s volume: had Thatcher been killed in the Brighton bombing of 1984; had Gore been president on 9/11 (in this last essay, written by the neo-con David Frum, any pretence to serious history is abandoned in favour of political propaganda masked as satire). No wonder Roberts refers approvingly to Kingsley Amis’s novel <em>Russian Hide-and-Seek</em>, which is set in a Soviet-occupied [[Britain]].

So what should the [[Marxist]]’s answer be? Definitely not to rehash [[Georgi Plekhanov]]’s dreary [[thoughts ]] [[about ]] the ‘[[role of the individual in history]]’ (had [[Napoleon]] never been [[born]], someone else would have had to play a similar [[role]], because the deeper [[historical necessity]] called for a passage to [[Bonapartism]]). I would rather question the premise that [[Marxist]]s (and [[left]]ists in general) are dumb [[determinist]]s who can’t entertain alternative scenarios.

The first thing to note is that ‘what if?’ [[history]] is part of a more general trend, one which takes issue with linear [[narrative]] and sees [[life ]] as a multiform flow. The ‘hard’ [[science]]s seem to be haunted by the randomness of life and possible alternative versions of [[reality]]: as [[Stephen Jay Gould]] put it, ‘wind back the [[film]] of life and play it again. The [[history]] of [[evolution]] will be totally different.’ This [[perception]] of our [[reality]] as only one of the possible outcomes of an ‘open’ [[situation]], the [[notion ]] that other possible outcomes continue to haunt our ‘true’ [[reality]], conferring on it an extreme fragility and [[contingency]], is by no means [[alien ]] to [[Marxism]]. Indeed, the felt urgency of the [[revolution]]ary [[act]] relies on it.

Since the non-occurrence of the [[October Revolution]] is a favourite topic of ‘what if?’ historians, it’s worth [[looking ]] at how [[Lenin]] himself related to counterfactuality. He was as far as he could be from any reliance on ‘[[historical necessity]]’. On the contrary, it was his [[Menshevik]] opponents who emphasised the [[impossibility]] of omitting one of the [[stages ]] prescribed by [[historical determinism]]: first [[bourgeois]]-[[democratic]], then [[proletarian]] [[revolution]]. When, in his ‘[[April Theses]]’ of 1917, [[Lenin]] claimed that this was the <em>[[Augenblick]]</em>, the unique opportunity to start a [[revolution]], his proposal was at first met with stupefaction or contempt by a large majority of his party colleagues. But he had [[understood ]] that the opportunity was provided by a unique combination of circumstances: if the [[moment ]] wasn’t seized, the [[chance ]] would be forfeited, perhaps for decades. [[Lenin]] was entertaining an alternative scenario: what if we don’t act now? It was precisely his [[awareness ]] of the catastrophic consequences of not acting that impelled him to act.

There is a much deeper commitment to alternative histories in the radical [[Marxist]] view. For a radical Marxist, the actual [[history]] that we live is itself the realisation of an alternative history: we have to live in it because, in the [[past]], we failed to seize the moment. In an outstanding [[reading ]] of [[Walter Benjamin]]’s ‘[[Theses on the Philosophy of History]]’ (which [[Benjamin]] never published), [[Eric Santner]] elaborated the notion that a [[present ]] [[revolution]]ary [[intervention ]] [[repeats]]/redeems failed attempts in the past. These attempts count as ‘[[symptom]]s’, and can be [[retroactively ]] redeemed through the ‘[[miracle]]’ of the [[revolutionary]] [[act]]. They are ‘not so much forgotten deeds, but rather forgotten <em>[[failures]]</em> to act, failures to <em>[[suspend]]</em> the force of [[social ]] bonds inhibiting [[acts ]] of [[solidarity]] with [[society]]’s “[[other]]s”’:

<blockquote>[[Symptom]]s [[register ]] not only past [[failed]] [[revolutionary]] attempts but, more modestly, past <em>failures to respond</em> to calls for [[action ]] or even for [[empathy ]] on behalf of those whose [[suffering ]] in some [[sense ]] belongs to the [[form ]] of life of which one is a part. They hold the [[place ]] of something that is <em>there</em>, that <em>insists</em> in our life, though it has never achieved [[full ]] [[ontological ]] consistency. [[Symptoms ]] are thus in some sense the virtual archives of voids – or, perhaps better, defences against voids – that persist in historical [[experience]].</blockquote>

For [[Santner]], these [[symptom]]s can also take the form of perturbations of ‘normal’ social life: [[participation]], for example, in the [[obscene]] [[ritual]]s of a reigning [[ideology]]. In this way of [[thinking]], [[Kristallnacht]] – a half-organised, half-spontaneous [[outburst ]] of [[violent]] attacks on homes, synagogues, businesses and individuals – becomes a [[Bakhtin]]ian [[carnival]], a [[symptom]] whose fury and [[violence]] revealed it as an attempt at ‘[[defence-formation]]’, a covering up of a previous failure to intervene effectively in [[Germany]]’s social crisis. In other [[words]], the very [[violence]] of the [[pogrom]]s was proof of the possibility of an authentic [[proletarian]] [[revolution]], its excessive [[energy ]] marking the reaction to an ([[unconscious]]) awareness of the missed opportunity. And is not the ultimate source of [[Ostalgie]] ([[nostalgia]] for the [[Communist]] past) among many intellectuals (and ordinary people) from the defunct [[German Democratic Republic]] also a longing not so much for the [[Communist]] past, but rather for what that past might have been, for the missed opportunity of creating an alternative [[Germany]]?

The ‘what if?’ [[dimension ]] goes to the core of the [[Marxist]] [[revolutionary]] [[project]]. In his ironic comments on the [[French Revolution]], [[Marx]] opposed revolutionary enthusiasm and the sobering ‘[[morning after]]’: the actual outcome of the [[sublime]] revolutionary explosion which promised [[liberté]], [[égalité]], [[fraternité]] is the miserable [[utilitarian]]/[[egotistical]] [[universe ]] of [[market]] calculation. (This gap was even wider in the case of the [[October Revolution]].) [[Marx]]’s point, however, is not the commonsensical one, that the vulgar [[reality]] of commerce turns out to be the ‘[[truth]] of the theatre of revolutionary enthusiasm’ – what all the fuss was about. In the revolutionary explosion, [[another ]] [[utopian]] dimension shines through, that of [[universal emancipation]], which is in fact the ‘[[excess]]’ betrayed by the [[market]] [[reality]] that takes over on the [[morning after]]. This [[excess]] is not simply abolished or dismissed as irrelevant, but is, as it were, transposed into the [[virtual]] [[state]], as a [[dream]] waiting to be realised.

* [[Lenin Shot at Finland Station]]. ''[[London ]] Review of Books''. Volume 27. [[Number ]] 16. August 18, 2005. <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n16/zize01_.html>. Also listed on ''[[Lacan]].com''. <http://www.lacan.com/zizekfinland.htm>.