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Göran Therborn What does the Ruling Class do When it Rules?.¹² At the same time, the new types of social stratification in late capitalism have been the object of studies at once more rigorous and more imaginative than anything historical materialism, even in its classical epoch, had produced in the past: Erik Olin Wright’s work in the United States, that of the Italian Carchedi, and the investigations of Roger Establet and Christian Baudelot in France, have been outstanding in this regard.¹³ The nature and dynamics of the post-capitalist states in the East, long prohibited terrain for serene enquiry on much of the European Left, have received new and searching attention, above all in Rudolf Bahro’s extraordinary The Alternative in Eastern Europe, but also in more specialist and scholarly form in the studies of economists like Nuti and Brus.¹⁴ Nor has this expansion of Marxist theory in economics, politics and sociology been accompanied by any corresponding contraction in the fields of philosophy or culture—the peculiar vineyards of Western Marxism. On the contrary, these years have also seen the accumulating work of Raymond Williams in England, materialist cultural studies in their broadest sense, and of Fredric Jameson in the United States, in the more specifically literary domain; while in philosophy G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History—A Defence, bringing for the first time the procedural standards of analytic philosophy to bear on the basic concepts of historical materialism, is clearly the landmark of the decade.¹⁵

      A staccato bibliography of this sort does not, of course, come near a comprehensive, let alone critical, inventory of the Marxist production of the past years. There are other works and names that could equally be mentioned; and those that have been are as much subject to their own limiting judgements as are any of their predecessors. However, even this rapid shorthand for a complex set of intellectual changes, which need much finer discrimination than there is time for here, indicates certain points. Although we can speak of a real topographical ‘break’ between Western Marxism and the emergent formation I have been outlining, in other respects there has perhaps been more continuity of connections than I allowed for, even if it has typically been a mediate one. Thus the influence of most of the older schools can be discerned in the background of many of the newcomers. The Althusserian current has probably persisted most strongly: of the names I mentioned earlier, Poulantzas, Therborn, Aglietta, Wright and Establet all owe different debts to it. The legacy of the Frankfurt School can be seen in Braverman’s work, through Baran, and Offe’s, through Habermas. The Lukácsian strain remains avowedly dominant in Jameson’s work. Carchedi’s reveals Della Volpean overtones. But at the same time, the very distribution of these authors hints at the more important fact that the geographical pattern of Marxist theory has been profoundly altered in the past decade. Today the predominant centres of intellectual production seem to lie in the English-speaking world, rather than in Germanic or Latin Europe as was the case in the inter-war and post-war periods respectively. That shift in locus represents an arresting historical change. Very much as I had felt might happen, the traditionally most backward zones of the capitalist world, in Marxist culture, have suddenly become in many ways the most advanced.

A more extended survey of authors and works would bring this home fully: the sheer density of ongoing economic, political, sociological and cultural research on the Marxist Left in Britain or North America, with its undergrowth of journals and discussions, eclipses any equivalent in the older lands of the Western Marxist tradition proper. But there is, of course, a further reason for the nascent Anglo-American hegemony in historical materialism today — one that has in its turn verified another of the predictions made in the mid-seventies. That is the rise of Marxist historiography to its long overdue salience within the landscape of socialist thought as a whole. In this area, the dominance of English-speaking practitioners had been evident ever since the fifties, and for many decades Marxism as an intellectual force, at least in England, had been virtually synonymous with the work of historians. Even the one outstanding thinker of an older generation and another formation, the economist Maurice Dobb, characteristically achieved his greatest influence with the essentially historical Studies in the Development of Capitalism (published in 1947), stretching from the late Middle Ages to the modern corporation, rather than with his prolific output on Marx’s political economy as such. It was Dobb’s younger colleagues, gathered in the seminal Communist Party Historians’ Group of the late forties and early fifties, however, who matured into the brilliant pleiad of scholars that transformed so many accepted interpretations of the English and European past in the following years: Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Edward Thompson, George Rudé, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan, Geoffrey de Ste-Croix and others. Most of these were publishing from the turn of the sixties onwards. But the consolidation of their collective work into a canon of commanding weight well beyond their own formal discipline, was really a development of the seventies. This was the decade which saw the publication of The Age of Capital by Hobsbawm, The World Turned Upside Down and Milton and English Revolution by Hill, Bond Men Made Free and The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages by Hilton, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution by Foster, Whigs and Hunters by Thompson, Lords of Humankind by Kiernan, now followed by Ste-Croix’s monumental Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World.¹⁶ Perhaps Raymond Williams’s most original and powerful book, The Country and the City, has its primary affiliation here, too. For someone of my generation, formed at a time when British culture seemed utterly barren of any indigenous Marxist impulse of moment, the laggard of Europe, which we constantly denounced as such, at risk of charges of ‘national nihilism’, this has been a truly astonishing metamorphosis. The traditional relationship between Britain and Continental Europe appears for the moment to have been effectively reversed — Marxist culture in the UK for the moment proving more productive and original than that of anv mainland state.

Meanwhile, a more restricted but not dissimilar change has occurred in North America. Here too, historiography has been the leading sector, with an extremely rich range of work — not confined to American history itself — from Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner, David Montgomery, Robert Brenner, David Abraham and many others.¹⁷ But around it a broader socialist culture has developed, not all of it Marxist, of striking variety and vitality, from the historical sociology of Immanuel Wallerstein and Theda Skocpol to the political economy of James O’Connor, the continuing work of Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, the cultural criticism of Christopher Lasch.¹⁸ The panorama in this respect is today radically distinct from anything even imaginable fifteen years ago. It is one in which Business Week can lament the widespread penetration of historical materialism into US campuses only four short years after Time was proclaiming that Marx was finally dead, and handbooks can be produced on the Left simply to guide the curious student through the thickets — now passably luxuriant — of ‘Marxism in the Academy’, to paraphrase a recent title.¹⁹

This historically centred Marxist culture that has emerged in the Anglophone world has, finally, not remained confined to its own provinces. The theoretical juncture between historiography and philosophy to which I looked forward in the mid-seventies did punctually occur, if with a violence that was far from my expectation of it. Edward Thompson’s prolonged and passionate polemic with Louis Althusser, The Poverty of Theory, turned an intellectual page — irreversibly. Whatever our view of the merits of the dispute, it is henceforward impossible for Marxists to proceed — as they did for many years, on either side — as if their history and their theory were two separate mental worlds, with little more than occasional tourism, mildly curious, between them. Theory now is history, with a seriousness and severity it never was in the past; as history is equally theory, in all its exigency, in a way that it typically evaded before. The assault by Thompson on Althusser also exemplified the breaking down of one further, crucial barrier: that which had

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