Hu Yaohui: An Analysis of the Event-Based Historical Outlook in Foreign Marxist Theory
Marx states in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: "At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution." [1] In reality, however, the timing of social transformation is not perfectly synchronized with the contradiction between the development of productive forces and relations of production; the lack of synchronicity between the superstructure and the economic base leads to a displacement between the occurrence of social contradictions and social revolution. Consequently, how one understands transformation within history becomes the core issue for understanding Marx’s historical materialism.
Revolution is a sudden event entirely distinct from the preceding society; it creates a rupture in history. People typically divide history into pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods after a revolution occurs to demonstrate the historical discontinuity it has caused. Therefore, reflections on historical transformation actually raise the question of how to handle the relationship between accidental rupture and continuity in history. Regarding this issue, within the history of Western Marxist thought, a group of scholars has highlighted the priority of historical discontinuity over continuity. They emphasize human agency, value historical contingency, oppose historical teleology and evolutionism, and attempt to use a "brand new" dialectic to seek a perfected historical materialism. What this article intends to trace is the genealogy of the event-based view of history within Western Marxist theory.
I. Benjamin and "Now-time"
To explore the event-based view of history in Western Marxist theory, one must return to the source of the problem: Hegel. For Hegel, history is the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit; the actions of every individual in world history are seen as moments through which Reason realizes its actuality. Thus, world history presents itself as a teleological process of alienation, the overcoming of alienation, and the attainment of the highest unity. Hegel’s conceptual dialectic has always been latent in the theoretical logic of many Western Marxist theorists. This often prevents people from correctly grasping the radical nature of Marx’s historical materialism, leading them instead to understand history through a logic of presupposed totality (which Jean-Paul Sartre called "totalization"). Yet we know that Marx’s historical materialism seeks not only to grasp the laws of historical development in thought but, more importantly, to change the world in actual history. When Marx cried out in the Communist Manifesto for the proletarians of all countries to unite, he was calling on the proletariat to break the continuity of history and create a history of their own.
The success of the October Revolution proved the bankruptcy of the linear-evolutionary view of history. Viewed purely from a theoretical standpoint, Eduard Bernstein’s criticisms of Lenin might seem meaningful: the Russian bourgeoisie was only in its nascent stage, the relations of production had not yet begun to constrain the productive forces, and many remnants of feudal relations of production remained; thus, the timing for revolution appeared not to have arrived. However, Lenin’s revolutionary practice forcefully refuted this critique of "premature" revolution, proving that historical development is not entirely linearly progressive but contains the possibility of rupture. Precisely because of this, the revolution could achieve victory in Russia, the "weakest link" [2] of the capitalist world.
Developments in reality drive theoretical reflection. It was the occasion of the October Revolution that led Western Marxist thinkers to begin contemplating historical development from the perspective of discontinuity. Walter Benjamin was the first scholar among Western Marxists to reflect on historical discontinuity. In 1939, as fascist atrocities grew increasingly rampant and the anticipated revolution remained nowhere in sight, Benjamin, sensing he could not escape his doom, wrote his final work, Theses on the Philosophy of History. Michael Löwy called this document "one of the most radical, pioneering, and developmental revolutionary thoughts since the Theses on Feuerbach." [3] The radicalism of Theses on the Philosophy of History lies in its first proposal of a rupture between revolutionary time and everyday time. In Benjamin’s view, history does not necessarily develop toward an ideal direction and is by no means teleological or evolutionist. Vulgar materialism (Benjamin’s primary target of criticism was the Second International and the German Social Democratic Party) assumed that social revolution would emerge following the development of productive forces; such a view was tantamount to hand-delivering weapons to the enemy. He asked: "How can the product of labor benefit the worker as long as it is not at his disposal?" [4]
Benjamin proposed that a materialist view of history should be established on a "constructive principle." "History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]." [5] The "time of the now" replaced empty, continuous time, allowing past, present, and future to be condensed within the construction of the "now."
First, history is discontinuous. In the progressive consciousness of historical time, revolution is an anticipated future event, but it is also indefinitely delayed. Benjamin, however, emphasized that at every "now" of time, a revolution of the oppressed can occur. A true historical materialist should not focus solely on the continuous totality of history but should look at every "now" that holds the possibility for transformation. He argued: "The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action." [6]
Second, historical time is oriented toward the past rather than the future. This shifts our gaze away from the analysis of general trends and onto the specific events occurring within the "monadic" spatial structure composed of the "now" and the past. Benjamin believed: "To Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as a Rome incarnate." [7] Marx also once said that the French Revolution appeared on the stage of history wearing Roman costume. The time of the "now" is a retrospective repetition; revolutions that failed in the past have not vanished into the dust but instead become the driving force for people today to take revolutionary action. Benjamin did not mean that history is constantly repeating itself, but rather that we must reclaim the lost discourse of the oppressed in the sense of Nietzsche's view of history. This has inextricable links with the historical consciousness of genealogy. The historicism criticized by Benjamin enumerates various historical facts and forcibly assigns them a fated causal thread, but this is clearly a form of "Whig history" written from the posture of the victor. By making the past present again, Benjamin was practicing a "politics of time" that reveals the hidden "truth" in history. Benjamin and Marx are consistent on the following point: if a true historical narrative exists, it can only unfold from the perspective of the proletariat. Thus, we can find that historical truth is vividly demonstrated not only in Marx’s Capital and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, but also in the specific revolutionary events discussed in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Civil War in France.
Finally, history is related to subjective action. In the famous "VIIIth Thesis," Benjamin said: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of exception' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of exception." [8] The "real state of exception" is the event. Unlike interpretations that emphasize objective historical structures, the event-based view of history emphasizes historical creation realized through subjective agency. Clearly, Benjamin’s event-based view of history ultimately carries forward the revolutionary aspect of historical materialism—that human beings create history. Slavoj Žižek strongly agrees with Benjamin on this point. In Žižek’s view, revolution is entirely a creationist (i.e., Benjamin's historical materialism—Author’s note) act: "it erases the dominant text and creates a new text out of nothing." [9] "Creation out of nothing" (ex nihilo) is the core concept of Žižek’s philosophy of the event; he clearly regards Benjamin as a pioneer of event theory.
Benjamin’s unique "dialectics at a standstill" points toward the action of the subject breaking false continuity. When thought stops because of a certain image, memory, or imagination, the subject begins to reflect on the constraints imposed by social ideology and aesthetic forms—constraints that constitute a "politicization of aesthetics." According to the concept of the "estrangement effect" (Verfremdungseffekt) proposed by Bertolt Brecht, the defamiliarization of everyday things brings the possibility of creating new meaning. Thus, dialectics in the "time of the now" is no longer a Hegelian synthesis but emphasizes the contingency and discontinuity possessed by the "state of exception." We could say that this mode of thinking, which stretches opposition and contrast to their limits, is a radical anti-Hegelianism.
By opposing the view of historical progress as continuous and linear, Benjamin restored the vitality that historical materialism ought to have. He focused on concrete historical events rather than applying historical materialism as a set of frozen laws, and he powerfully pointed out the limitations of the linear-progressive view of history. This perspective is rich with revolutionary and emancipatory significance. Benjamin opened up reflections on historical discontinuity for Western Marxists in two ways. First, his historical materialism emphasized events within history, no longer taking the totalizing trend of history as a prerequisite. He shifted the theoretical focus of Marx’s historical materialism, explaining the development and change of history through a focus on monadic historical objects and discontinuity. Second, if a "real state of exception" is completely disconnected from everyday events, it seems to become an absolute contingency itself; to overcome this contingency, Benjamin resorted to Jewish Messianism. He said: "For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter." [10] This is where Benjamin’s event-based view of history becomes incompatible with historical materialism. Therefore, we shall see that if history is viewed as event-based, then how to handle the relationship between contingency and necessity becomes a challenge that the event-based view of history must confront.
II. Althusser’s Conjuncturalism
People usually look for the connection between Louis Althusser and Benjamin in the field of materialist aesthetics [11]; in fact, the two are even closer in their historical consciousness. Both Benjamin and Althusser rejected the Hegelian concept of history, opposed a homogenous view of time, and valued structural analysis of the "time of the now." The difference is that Althusser focused more on the materialist conditions under which change or revolution is produced. Within the genealogy of Western Marxist thought, he is classified as a structuralist Marxist, but looking at his theoretical development as a whole, such a definition is inappropriate. [12] The author prefers to view him as a conjuncturalist. Althusser continued Benjamin’s historical reflections and placed historical contingency above necessity, a theme that persisted from his early works For Marx and Reading Capital to his later "materialism of the encounter."
Conjuncture (conjoncture) refers to the primordial form through which an event is produced. It carries contingency, yet it determines the future of the event. A conjuncture cannot be theorized; it is a convergence of concrete historical content, "constituted by various opposing and mixed forces." [13] The "force" (shi) in conjuncture reflects trends within history, but these trends do not possess necessity; rather, they contain a "void." "It has meaning only because it has arranged or contains a place, a void: only the empty can be filled, and only the empty can provide a field of action for individuals or collectives, allowing them to occupy it in order to recombine and form various forces to accomplish the political tasks assigned by history—the void is for the future." [14] The "void" is contingency; its meaning is undetermined (Benjamin’s "monad" is similar in this sense), and the answer can only be provided by historical action. Starting from the 1970s, Althusser returned to the thought of Machiavelli to find the beginnings of historical materialism. He regarded Machiavelli as a representative of conjuncturalism, believing that his analysis was "strictly subject to the problems raised and imposed by the concrete circumstances of the conjuncture... it was not raised by simple intellectual comparison, but by the confrontation of existing class forces and their relationship of uneven development—actually, by their accidental future." [15]
Regarding the understanding of historical contingency, it would be unfair to categorize Althusser as a complete contingentist; however, we can indeed sense a tension inherent in the temporal consciousness of the evental view of history within his discourse. In his early essay "Contradiction and Overdetermination," Althusser pointed out: "The general contradiction... is sufficient to define the situation when revolution is 'on the agenda', but it cannot by itself directly create a 'revolutionary situation', let alone a situation for the outbreak of the revolution and the victory of the revolution." [6] For Althusser, the contradiction between the contingency of the event and historical laws manifests as the contradiction between the historical structure (mode of production) and the elements of the conjuncture. As we know, Althusser intended to resolve this problem using a brand-new dialectic: overdetermination.
Overdetermination holds that the structure of an event is fundamentally unbalanced, and this imbalance is determined by the immanence of the social formation. Within a contradictory whole, there always exists a dominant structure; within this dominant structure, there is a principal contradiction and several secondary contradictions. Under certain conditions, the principal and secondary contradictions transform into one another, propelling the continued development of history. Only by analyzing the existing contradictory relations of the "complex déjà donné" [7] (already given) totality can one judge whether history is moving toward "historical stagnation," the "braking of contradictions," or the "outbreak of revolution." Although Althusser admitted that the conjuncture of a moment is ultimately determined by the dominant structure of productive forces and relations of production, he placed greater emphasis on the particularity of every moment. He believed that we "are always within the particular," and that the "analysis of labor and capital... is always specifically defined by the concrete historical situation and historical environment in which the contradictions operate."
Althusser's overdetermination is far from being "deterministic"; instead, it consistently preserves the tension of the evental view of history. "The determination in the last instance by the economy is realized in real history precisely through the alternation of the economy, politics, theory, etc., playing the primary role." In fact, Althusser never truly resolved the problem of historical necessity—the "determination in the last instance by the economy"—which led him, in the final years of his life, to move completely toward the materialism of the encounter.
Consequently, the chain of historical causality was replaced by Althusser's structural causality. The former is Hegelian dialectics, in which each link in the whole "is nothing but the actual existence of the Concept in itself at a certain historical link"; the latter is Spinozist dialectics, where "the existence of the entire structure lies in its effect." When this is the case, the logic of the event's occurrence is entirely the product of internal structural struggles and conflicts. After abolishing the distinction between the superstructure and the economic base, Althusser's evental view of history also abolished any possible predetermined conclusions. He wrote: "The ontology of actual existence opposes... all knowledge of the future." Facing such a history, Althusser called it the "necessity of contingency." In this way, history, as an open process, is filled with conflicting trends; only relatively and temporarily stable points of reference become contingent yet concrete events.
Let us now re-examine Althusser's famous assertion: "History is a process without a subject." This does not mean Althusser denied the role of humans in creating history; he only denied the practice of viewing empirical individuals or abstract Man as the subject of history. In his view, "who the subject is" is a question to be answered by the historical conjuncture. If we conceptually replace "subject" with "actor" in society, we might reduce misunderstandings of Althusser. What Althusser's theory of conjuncture seeks to narrate is the dialectical movement between actors and their cultural, social, and economic environments within concrete historical situations.
So, what kind of history does Althusser's evental view actually depict? It should be said that its intent is to grasp the problem of the revolutionary situation—what might be called "the Leninist problem." Althusser constantly cited the analyses and decisions made by Lenin in the face of the Russian revolutionary situation because, in his view, only a revolutionary can fully understand that the Marxist dialectic includes, in its positive understanding of the existing state of things, at the same time an understanding of the negation of that state. For Althusser, revolution always takes place in concrete history. Overdetermination does not attempt to describe a structural whole, but rather to describe the structural shifts of contradictions. The economic base, ideological apparatuses, climatic and geographical factors, cultural practices, and subjects are simultaneously gathered in the force field of the conjuncture, contending with one another. Revolution does not occur within certainty but rather realizes "historical necessity through the 'contingency' of the individual... according to this necessity, the future must naturally replace its 'present'."
Althusser wanted to emphasize that any revolution is a concrete practical activity within present time. The contingency of the current conjuncture opens up a space for our action, and the only weapon we possess is the analytical method of multiple contradictions. Under contemporary capitalist conditions, proletarian resistance has become incredibly complex; relying solely on the subject’s conviction in inevitable victory is insufficient to cope with constantly changing capitalist transformations. We must find the limits of individual action within concrete conjunctures. The Messiah will not descend at any moment but is hidden only within incredibly concrete struggles. Therefore, when Althusser’s students criticized his structuralist tendencies for leading to his inactivity in 1968, they precisely misunderstood the radicalism of Althusser’s theory. The temporality of multiple contradictions challenges all dogmatic historical materialism; it calls upon those who truly grasp the truth to act according to the circumstances.
III. Badiou’s Theory of the Event
In contemporary radical Left thought, both Benjamin and Althusser are repeatedly invoked in various guises. Slavoj Žižek’s call for divine violence, Giorgio Agamben’s exploration of the state of exception, and Alain Badiou’s inheritance of the "aleatory encounter" all represent theoretical creations that "return to the fundamentals to break new ground" (守正创新) [8]. This reflects the trajectory of foreign Marxist theoretical logic shifting from necessity to contingency.
We have previously reshaped the "undercurrent" of this shift from the perspective of the evental view of history. It was the state of exception proposed by Benjamin and the theory of conjuncture by Althusser that laid the foundation for this logical transition toward historical contingency. However, whether it was Benjamin’s appeal to the Messiah or Althusser’s "determination in the last instance by the economy," both attempted to retain historical necessity. In today’s radical Left thought, historical truth has become a nominalist concept in the Platonic sense. Consequently, the problem of historical contingency is not an epistemological question of priority but has become a historical ontology. That is to say, what is needed now is not to construct an epistemological principle of contingency, but to construct a historical dialectic with contingency as its principle. One could say that the "event" has transformed from a view of history into an "evental materialism."
Badiou uses mathematical ontology to explain the ontological status of the event. In his view, the event is a "non-being" multiplicity that cannot be accommodated by the current state of existence; it is the "nothing" in the current situation. Therefore, we have no means to express this event that does not belong to the current situation. Badiou borrows Jacques Lacan’s notion that "the Real absolutely cannot be symbolized" to highlight the rupture and unpredictability of the event. Badiou's event is absolute contingency; it parts ways with all philosophies of ontology. The event is not a forgotten "Being," but a void that can only be described after its occurrence. In this sense, Badiou does indeed have the "miracle complex" that Žižek criticizes. Žižek remarked that Badiou might be "the last great writer in the French Catholic tradition from Pascal and Malebranche onwards."
If this is so, how is the event a "truth-event"? How can an event as "non-being" embody historical truth? Badiou’s answer is that truth is not epistemological truth but a practical, ethical truth. Only when the interventionist action of a specific subject—the proletariat—touches the fundamental social contradiction of class struggle does it become a truthful event. The event itself contains the "preconditioned" perspective of the subject; in this, we see the "tradition of the oppressed" mentioned by Benjamin revived after half a century. From this, it is clear that the subject, the event, and truth are mutually constitutive. An actor intervenes in a situation at a certain moment based on conviction. After an event occurs, the actor completes their own subjectivization by naming the event, thereby also establishing the event. The reason this event is truth is determined by the nature of the subject intervening in the event.
To ensure the contingency of the event, Badiou deliberately redefined the universality of truth. He argues that truth is "generic." Generic truth is not a Being as Being, but an operation relative to the internal elements of a situation, which prevents truth from falling into the trap of traditional transcendental metaphysics. Badiou’s so-called truth is a category adapted to the "irreducible multiplicity of being." Through truth procedures, generic truth utilizes the occasion of the event to create a pure multiplicity previously unrepresented in the specific situation. Since inconsistency and void necessarily exist within any set, the subject’s operation of making truth manifest in the process of creating an event is necessarily universal in this sense. However, the "multiplicity" suppressed by each situation differs, so each recurrence of truth is distinct. Thus, Badiou’s truth ensures formal equivalence between events while leaving room for diversified resistance in different fields. History always repeats, but never identically.
After Badiou pushes the contingency of the event to its extreme, contingency severs all links with necessity. It is no longer the "necessity of contingency," but the "absoluteness of contingency." Thus, we see that synthesis in the dialectic is no longer possible; borrowing Benjamin’s term, history becomes a discrete, ruptured "constellation." Badiou’s dialectic is a dialectic of split; there is no connection between the beginning and the end of an event. The form and content of things are completely separated (an example being Badiou linking the universality of truth with the exception of the event). Being no longer transforms into its opposite from the internal contradictions of a thing’s development but is rigidly juxtaposed among ruptured events. Badiou also calls his historical dialectic an "anti-dialectical dialectic." Consequently, we see his return to Kant: the split between the thing-in-itself and the world of phenomena. In persistently rejecting the idealist elements of Hegelian dialectics, Badiou throws the baby out with the bathwater.
Rather than examining Badiou’s evental view of history within Heidegger’s philosophical thought on Ereignis (which would dissolve the radicalism of the evental view through commonplace postmodern philosophical critique and lacks a basic dialectical perspective), it is better to unfold these reflections within the practical problems of revolutionary events opened by the October Revolution. For Badiou, Žižek, and others, the timing of revolution is not deduced from historical objectivity but is a decisive change brought about by the intervention of the subject. As the debate between Lenin and the Mensheviks in the second half of 1917 showed, only Lenin saw that the timing for revolution had arrived. What was needed now was not waiting, but a "tiger's leap." Therefore, the evental view of history is not merely a pure reflection on the philosophy of history, but possesses intense political connotations, causing a revival of the idea of communism in contemporary Left thought.
In Badiou’s view, the only state of exception in politics is communism, because it respects the equality of every individual. Therefore, political action upheld by communist conviction is a generic procedure (procédure générique) for creating truth. He stated: "Marx called the human being in the process of self-emancipation the 'species-being,' and the 'proletariat' is the name of the human who could become the species-being." The scope of the proletariat is not fixed but is revealed in the ever-evolving truth procedures. Thus, the communist movement Badiou calls for has no fixed model. All kinds of political movements have the potential to produce communist forms that did not exist before. Žižek also calls for mobilizing the people to "generate their own reality" by struggling for the idea of "communism." At a time when the Western Left movement feels lost, the theoretical aim of the evental view of history is a view of history as an action of permanent revolution. Events are always unexpected; thus, the actions we take for our own emancipation are destined to be full of hardships.
Up to this point, the author has surveyed the evental historiography within the development of Western Marxism, spanning from Benjamin to Althusser and then to Badiou. From a historical perspective, each emergence of an evental historiography occurred during a period when the international communist movement faced setbacks. Theoretically speaking, their various evental historiographies share a common worldview: they all believe that the world is inherently non-closed, and that any attempt to suture social contradictions is merely a "master-signifier" [13] of the victors. The "event," conversely, is precisely the act that operates upon the fundamental rift. Consequently, their dialectics all reject the logic of identity and totality in the Hegelian sense; they no longer pursue the transformation of contradictions through the "negation of the negation," but instead absolutize social antagonisms. By leveraging the agency of the subject, they aim to achieve disruptive transformations of the social structure.
Their evental historiography highlights rational factors within historical materialism, such as humanity’s role in making history and the non-linear development of history. Their construction of the basic principles of historical materialism is inspiring and reveals a theoretical path within Western Marxism distinct from cultural critique. However, their evental historiographies invariably fall into the same trap. We know that the transformation from quantitative change to qualitative change is a rational factor in the dialectics of development; revolution, as a qualitative change, can be understood as an "event" entirely distinct from the current situation. Evental historiography correctly perceives this factor in the occurrence of an event, but it utterly exaggerates this difference to the point of treating it as pure contingency and rupture. Ultimately, this mystifies the event itself, thereby distancing it from historical materialism. What we must do is remove the metaphysical coloring from the event and return to Marx's analysis of events. We must re-place the human being within a real environment and focus on how people make history within the basic social structure and the totalizing truth of history, thereby dialectically understanding the tension between contingency and necessity, and between subject and structure, in history.
IV. Evental Historiography in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
In discussing his conception of history, Marx famously wrote: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." (30) The tension expressed in this sentence between "men making history" and "making it under certain conditions" has been argued repeatedly, yet people often overlook the fact that this judgment arose from Marx's concrete analysis of a historical event—the French coup of 1851. Therefore, we need to return to Marx's analysis of concrete historical events to resolve this tension. Marx's analysis in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte fundamentally follows a class perspective. He first views the event of the Brumaire coup as the result of the movement and development of class relations. In his description, the revolutionary character of the proletariat, the petty-bourgeois democrats, the bourgeois republicans, the Party of Order, and Bonaparte’s armed forces retreats in succession, and the conflicts between these classes are ultimately constrained by the economic conditions in which each class finds itself.
However, Marx did not rigidly transplant class viewpoints into the explanation of the historical situation (conjuncture); otherwise, it would have been a simple linear historical narrative. He was not afraid to present the tragedies and comedies of history to the people as "living current events." He not only affirms contingency in history but, more importantly, demonstrates from the perspective of historical materialism how to scientifically integrate the dialectical relationship between macro-historical trends, concrete historical situations, and contingent historical events.
Marx begins with the historical situation. The historical situation shapes the possibility of an event’s appearance and creates the historical events in which various subjects act. Marx says: "I, on the contrary, demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and conditions that allowed a mediocre and grotesque personage to play a hero's role." (31) Looking at the historical situation in France, the breakout of two world-scale economic events intensified social discontent. The first was the potato blight and harvest failure of 1845 and 1846; the second was the general commercial and industrial crisis in Britain. The British crisis caused factories in British industrial zones to close, forcing French factory owners and big merchants who originally did business abroad to return to the domestic market. This led to the bankruptcy of the Parisian petty bourgeoisie and sparked discontent; this was the historical situation of the February Revolution. But the situation does not entirely determine the direction of the event’s occurrence; it is here that the event itself possesses an element of contingency.
The political demands of the petty bourgeoisie did not follow the original script. The initial demand of the February Revolution was the petty bourgeoisie's call for electoral reform; the proletariat was not the primary factor facilitating the event. However, "when the people had actually reached the barricades, when the National Guard maintained a passive attitude," the development of this situation exceeded the original imagination. Thus, an action intended to "expand the circle of those with political privileges within the possessing class and to overthrow the exclusive rule of the finance aristocracy" was forced, by the development of the revolution, to declare itself a "Social Republic." (32) This development clearly exceeded the stipulations of the prior situation, manifesting as an unexpected reversal. "The February Revolution was a surprise attack, a taking of the old society unawares, and the people proclaimed this unexpected stroke a deed of world-historic importance, which ushered in a new era [N]." (33)
In such descriptions, Marx's historical materialism exhibits the dimension of contingency within evental historiography. The contingent consequences caused by individual actions often overflow specific historical situations, and Marx further emphasizes the necessity of the contingent dimension appearing in history. In a letter to Kugelmann, he pointed out: "World history would indeed be very easy to make, if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favorable chances. It would, on the other hand, be of a very mystical nature, if 'accidents' played no part. These accidents themselves fall naturally into the general course of development and are compensated for by other accidents. But acceleration and delay are very dependent upon such 'accidents,' which include the 'accident' of the character of those who at first stand at the head of the movement." (34) Here, even the contingency of personal character is taken into account! This shows the breadth of the social "current events" that Marx's evental historiography can grasp.
Although the development of events is full of contingency, Marx did not allow this logic to develop to extremes like the aforementioned Western Marxists; instead, he further "purified" the contingent events. Marx’s narrative involves subjects with "different characters" and their actions: Bonaparte, Cavaignac, Barrot, Fould, Changarnier, etc., but they are all displayed within the structure of party and class, presented as spokespersons or mediators of their own classes. From the February Revolution to the June Revolution, to the successive falls of the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Party of Order, and finally to the restoration of Bonaparte, Marx unfolds his narrative with the clue of parliamentary party struggles. The contingency of events is manifested in the facts of the gradual fragmentation and failure of the petty-bourgeois Democrats and the Party of Order. Here, Marx unifies various concrete figures and events within a fixed period into the framework of class analysis, allowing us to more accurately grasp the meaning and trends of contingent events. Thus, we see the dialectical relationship between subjects on the historical stage—who may not necessarily possess conscious class consciousness—and the irresistible trends of history. These actors on the stage unconsciously represent the interests of their respective classes, but their different characters and working styles allow their underlying motives to be displayed through a myriad of bizarre events. The most prominent example is the Democratic Party (the Mountain), which excessively exaggerated its own strength: "The democrat, because he represents the petty bourgeoisie... imagines himself elevated above class antagonism generally. The democrats concede that a privileged class confronts them, but they, along with all the rest of the nation, form the people." (35) Therefore, when they fail, they can only attribute the reason to "some accidental event."
Behind the class analysis hides the necessity of the development of contradictions. The development and failure of the February and June Revolutions were manifestations of the internal contradictions of the decisive class factor—economic conditions. The February Revolution was a premature revolution. "The workers believed they could emancipate themselves side by side with the bourgeoisie; they also thought they could achieve a proletarian revolution within the national walls of France, side by side with the other bourgeois nations. But French relations of production are conditioned by the foreign trade of France, by her position on the world market and the laws thereof. How could France break them without a European revolutionary war, which would strike back at the despot of the world market, England?" (36) It is precisely in the contradictory movement between the productive forces and the relations of production that the contingent events in history receive a necessary explanation. It is precisely because it is based on the materialist conception of history that Bonaparte’s coup was not interpreted merely as a maneuver of political trickery, but could be scientifically predicted. The Bonaparte dynasty represented the interests of the small-holding peasantry; with the increasing decomposition of small-land ownership, the state edifice built upon it would also collapse. "If the Imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will crash from the top of the Vendôme Column." (37) History proved this to be exactly the case.
The interconnectedness and mutual constraint between the three levels—the economic base (long duration), the class perspective (historical situation), and the historical event (short duration)—constitute the foundation of Marx's evental historiography, where any one level is constrained by the other two. Because of this, Marx's evental historiography simultaneously explains the intersection of historical contingency and necessity, and of the long duration and short duration. It depicts the inversions, regressions, and contingencies occurring in the short duration, but because these inversions, regressions, and contingencies are subsumed under the synchronic structure of the class perspective, they do not deviate from the perspective of the necessity of historical development—the productive forces and relations of production. Or to put it the other way around: precisely because it encompasses accidental events in history, Marx's historical materialism is not a "Grand Narrative" historical view in the Hegelian sense; it reminds us to fully recognize the open perspective contained within the materialist conception of history. And this openness requires delving into concrete events.
Reflecting on the evental historiography of the aforementioned Western Marxists, we can offer two criticisms. First, their evental historiography only grasps the level of historical situation/historical event, failing to understand the contingency of events within a longer duration, thus confusing historical contingency with openness. For example, Badiou often emphasizes that the French May 1968 revolution was a completely independent event, but he fails to see that this event was only a link in world history, occurring simultaneously with student protest movements worldwide, the global anti-Vietnam War movement, and the U.S. civil rights movement—all large-scale anti-capitalist movements. Only by possessing a world-historical vision can one master the historical necessity of revolutionary events within the basic contradictions of capitalist development. Second, revolutionary movements are not equivalent to the arbitrary actions of subjects; the proletariat remains the fundamental subject of revolution. The generalization of "class" inevitably leads to the neglect of the fundamental contradictions, economic conditions, political situations, and the resulting limits on action within a concrete historical situation. If the subject lacks a potent party organization, its resistance can only be a "single-point explosion" rather than sparking a true world revolution. This also causes the understanding of events to fall either into a voluntaristic decisionism or into a Messianic "miracle" view of history.
(Affiliation: School of Marxism, Renmin University of China) Web Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Marxism & Reality, Issue 1, 2025