In 1938, a year before Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Germany, CLR James wrote in his seminal study of Haitian independence, The Black Jacobins:
“In a revolution, when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts in volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are meaningless chaos and lend themselves to infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the sub-soil from which they came.”
A romantic enough call to historical materialism in its own right, at least in its imagery, but one that reasserts a fundamental principle of marxist historiography. Infrastructure undergirds superstructure; material conditions determine cultural and political events. That formula seems antiquated now, perhaps, the algebra of another day. Yet the figure sketched by James should interest us because it breaks with a familiar architectural metaphor of classical marxism.
If our being isn’t a house– if the social, the cultural, the ideological aren’t simply floor topping floor, further and further from the material foundation– then which is the apposite model? In the passage quoted above, James gives us a geological metaphor: the stirring of men and women into action seems seismic and in that sense inexorable, yet there is more here than the collision of the tectonic plates of the classes. To the observer that subterranean clash of forces is visible mainly in “meteoric flares and filghts” which dazzle the senses– a spectacle of effects that threaten to empty the event (“a revolution”) of meaning.
