What counts as history?

Marx ( German Ideology , 1845-46) objected to historians of the past for what they left out of history. The first presumption of historical study, he suggested, is “human existence,” which means that “men must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history.’” Seems pretty obvious, but he goes on to point out that “life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is, therefore, the production of material life itself.” What people eat and how, where they live and how they got there, what they put on their backs are all historical questions, because none of these things sprang fullgrown at the origin of humanity.

Historians in the past simply assumed this material life, and moved on to what they took as “historical,” that is, battles and successions and political struggles. Marx, by contrast, insisted that the production of material life “is indeed a historical act, as thousands of years ago, must be accomplished every day and every hour merely in order to sustain life.”

Similar conceptual moves lay behind the development of the idea of “nature” as an ahistorical, metaphysical entity: “The whole previous conception of history has either completely neglected this real basis ofhistory or else has considered it a secondary matter without any connection to the course of history. Consequently, history has always to be written in accordance with an external standard; the real production of life appears as ahistorical, while what is historical appears as separated from ordinary life, as supra-terrestrial. Thus the relation of man to Nature is excluded from history and in this way the antithesis between Nature and history is established.”