Sorry to be back again and so soon (you do have my full sympathies, reader - I find my assigned task of writing this stuff bad enough, your assigned task of reading this stuff seems far worse!) but on the other hand, well, here I stand I can do no other.

Among what Marx and Marxism provides us is a set of intellectual resources for understanding how certain social phenomena - actions, attitudes, relationships, institutions, etc - continue over time, even if often in varying forms. For instance, while Marx doesn’t quite give us a full account of racism and sexism, his account of capitalism helps explain the reproduction of sexism and racism over time, and how that reproduction has been a kind of evolution with new mutant forms arising periodically and sometimes being quite long lasting. This means Marx is helpful for analyzing both continuity and change over time, and how continuity often takes the form of change (variations on phenomena over time means those phenomena are persisting; sometimes a mutation or variation is how persistence over time occurs).

Personally, I tend to think of historical work as focused on what happens in a specific range of years in specific places and to think of theory as being more general, less bound to specifics of time and place - Marx theorizes capitalism in general in ways that apply to all capitalist societies. That’s fine as a sort of workaday distinction if not made too much of, but it can be made too much of. I think what I said about Marx and structural reproduction implies analysis that sits sort of awkwardly between (or, generatively indicates limits of the two supposedly cleanly distinguishable) historical and theoretical in the way I just used the term. One the hand, to understand some important phenomena we have to look at specific ranges of time and place because those phenomena only exists in specific ranges of time and place.

For instance, for much of the 19th and early 20th century judges in the US often used injunctions against workers taking collective action, with that being significantly curtailed after the Norris-LaGuardia Act in 1932. Labor injunctions like that just don’t exist at the level of generality of capitalism as a type of society - that kind of theoretical account is tremendously valuable for bracketing out some concrete particulars to help us see more fundamental patterns, but some of what is bracketed out is also significantly important. We can, and in some contexts, should, ask why labor injunctions continued for a long time before suddenly being dropped.

That asking and answering is not theory-less historical work, though. First off, such a thing just doesn’t exist - atheoretical empiricism is actually theoretically informed but not self-reflexive about the theory informing it. Second, that particular matter of labor injunctions, like many important matters, simply can’t be investigated well enough without some use of the general account of capitalism we get via Marx’s Capital. (It’s kind of impolite to say out loud but Marxists just understand capitalism more and better than non-Marxists, all things being equal.) My point is that this kind of investigation has a both/and relationship to the simplistic ‘on the one hand there’s history and on the other hand there’s theory’ distinction I made a moment ago. For some questions we need Marx’s Capital to help us to pose and to answer them well and yet the posing and answering requires some investigation in addition to reading Capital. (On this stuff generally I’m very partial to the section on “historical logic” in EP Thompson’s Poverty of Theory, which also includes a funny joke about the philosophers all leaving the room to eat ice cream while Thompson speaks only to the historians.)
This is likely all obvious but it wasn’t to me! (The O in Open Mode stands for Obvious. And the P, E, and N stand for Pretty Ennoying Nate. Obviously.) To some extent this is just me thinking through my being someone who sometimes does some historical work and who is a Marxist committed to that theoretical perspective. At the same time while I’d never claim any real significance to my own individual writing I do think history writing as a general pursuit, as an activity done by a number of people that’s both kinda big and too small, is important. Furthermore, Marxist history writing in particular is important and I wish there was a lot more of it, especially in my field of US history. Part of why I think it’s important is just that I’m a convinced historian. But a more important reason is that I think there patterns over time in the world that are pretty significant but are bracketed out or which don’t appear in the more general account of capitalism that Marx provides. Like, there social phenomena that really matter in the world and in a lot of people’s lives and which persist for relatively long periods of time. We should be able to give accounts of them for analytical purposes and having correct or incorrect accounts of them can sometimes matter for left strategy and collective action. (I think my example of labor injunctions is probably debatable in its importance, I’d be happy to agree to disagree on that particular example, I meant it as an example to illustrate what I meant rather than raising it to assert its particular importance.)

I don’t know if this is directly on point or not but it’s where my mind goes -- what I reach to as I try to think about this stuff are these bits from Simon Clarke’s chapter in the book Postfordism and Social Form -- https://files.libcom.org/files/2024-01/Post-Fordism%2520and%2520Social%2520Form.pdf. I believe that link opens the PDF directly, just FYI. Clarke writes that within actually existing capitalism in the world at any time and place we find “a set of institutional forms which structured the tendency to overaccumulation and crisis” providing a “stabilisation of capitalism” on a (necessarily) temporary basis. (111.) Clarke stress that these institutional forms were “best understood as institutional forms of class relationships” and of class struggle. (113. Later in the same essay Clarke refers to “institutional forms of capitalist class domination”, which should be understood as a synonym: class struggle presupposes the existence of class as domination and for Clarke, as for Marx, class is always lived out as dynamic struggle. 127.) Understanding these institutional forms as they actually exist requires thinking historically about actually existing conflicts and crises - the specifics can’t be read off of a theoretical account of capitalism - because “the development of these institutional forms” is determined by the development of the social and political struggles unleashed by the contradictory tendencies of capital accumulation.” (128.) That’s also informed by Clarke’s book Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State, which I eventually want to reread. Part of why I like Clarke so much is that he did a kind of theoretically informed investigation like I’m thinking of and, closely related, his theoretical work is rich with resources for historical/empirical investigation.

This is all a long run up to what I actually had on my mind, me trying to think out some contextualizing conceptual framework for the following. I’m doing some reading in the history of public health, as I’ve mentioned before (and will no doubt continue to mention, not least because I’m a whiner and this shit is hard and my time and energy are so scarce - I’d be so good at being independently wealthy...!) and as part of that I’m most of the way through Nancy Bristow’s American Pandemic: Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic. Bristow gets into various pandemic responses by various actors - it’s a well done work of history, I recommend it to all the history-readers interested in public health, history of medicine, etc.

Reading Bristow again today two or maybe three thoughts occurred to me, but in sort of inchoate form (once again, I work pretty much entirely in half thoughts glimpsed only as the tips of roots that I want to dig out of the ground and maybe - someday! wash and otherwise modify once dug up. Typing out all that Marx and Clarke stuff was a way to get these thoughts out of the ground.) One thought is that so far I think I’ve implicitly been trying to specify in my mind what public health is, to situate it as a sort of gear in the social machinery to be able to go this gear is turned by this gear and turns that other gear. I think there’s a lot to do that really, but at the same time I think it’d be better to conceptualize it in addition as not just a gear with a specific place in relation to other gears, but as a repertoire of various forms of action a) by certain political actors in relation to others and b) in certain kinds of contexts/in relation to certain kinds of problems and recurrent phenomena. That is, public health is in part a set of moves some people make, and a set of resources for making those moves (with those resources also barring or at least weighing against other moves).
The second and maybe third thought is that public health’s arising in the first place may have been a relatively contingent event within the history of actually existing capitalist societies (I’m genuinely not sure if I think that or not) but after arising it has been structurally/systematically reproduced over time by/within the actually existing capitalist societies of which public health is an element. Furthermore, in my efforts/impulses to go ‘okay but what even is public health?’ and my nitpicks about earlier historians like Rosen, I think what I’m really talking about is a timebound phenomenon particular to actually existing capitalism - analogous to labor injunctions - but the period of time and range in space is really quite large. (I.e., public health is kind of important? Because it affects lots of people?) Even more furtherly furthermore, as I’ve tried to say before I think actually existing public health (more on this in a moment, i.e., a qualifying self-quibble coming soon, brace yourself and/or get ready to close the tab) is not a matter of caring for the health/well being of individuals or collectivities in group settings or a matter of all forms of doing what Foucault called biopolitics, those are both too vague and general. Actually existing public health (that quibble will be here soon, brace for impact!!) is a more particular historical specification of - i.e., it’s a range of ways of doing what’s involved in - those more general categories I just mentioned (care for well being as such or biopolitics as such).

Even furtherly more furthermore still, actually existing public (quibble impact imminent!) as a historical specification of those more patterns/ranges/concepts/whatever of social practice both a) arose in response to various kinds of conflicts and crises shaped by the logic of capitalist social relations as that logic played out concretely, and b) has been reproduced by that logic over time since arising. Again, that’s the way in which actually existing public health (duck and cover!!) is analogous to labor injunctions and it’s that quality of system-encouraged persistence over time that I meant to draw out by that analogy.

Now the self-quibble: I am very unsure of the degree to which what I’ve been calling ‘actually existing public health’ is something that exists out in the world with an internal consistency or is an artifact of interpretation on my part. That is, am I finding a bundle of phenomena in the world that hangs together as bundle, or am I identifying phenomena and saying ‘we can treat these as bundled (or as unbundled, as distinct, since I keep emphasizing ‘not all biopolitics!’ ‘sewer building is proto-public health, not public health’ and so on) via metaphor/analogy/interpretive concept, etc.

This may be a misguided quibble on my part, I dunno. I’m inclined to say that there is a there there, that there really is a relatively distinct domain of social practice demarcated by ‘actually existing public health’ in the ways I was handwaving about the other day - semi-medicalized state-knowledge for purposes of governance etc, and that I’m just not yet clear on how to articulate that domain, but again, I don’t really know for sure. I don’t think I’m just being silly in this self-quibble (I’m very open - as per the Mode! - to the idea that all this is silly in important respects, but nevertheless...) Insofar as I’m somewhat committed to saying ‘public health arises in time as part of capitalist society then becomes something structurally/systemtically reproduced over time’ it is, I think, reasonable to also try to specify what it is that I think has arisen and been reproduced. And, again, I think that reproduction has been pretty long-lasting.
I’m not saying public health hasn’t changed since, I don’t know (I mean, I really don’t know! there’s much lit left to review in ye olde litte reviewe! Please excuse my failing sense of humor) 1920 or 1950 or whatever but my impulse is to say that on the one hand there was a beginning to public health and on the other hand there was after that an evolution of public health. I’m interested in both the origins and the subsequent evolution. I was fumbling above using metaphors of gears vs repertoire. I’m inclined to say public health’s beginnings were product of prior repertoires, some of which became institutionalized and then reproduced (in changing ways, the field has evolved at least to some degree, I assume anyway...). I’m also inclined to say that the range involved in public health’s repertoire/in public health as repertoire after it began matters a great deal. This is likely me just getting hung up again/tripping over matters of change of degree of analytical abstraction again: specifying what gear it is, what other gears it meshes with, etc, is just a different problem than identifying the content, effects, contexts, and forces (re)producing the contexts of the repertoire. Both are worthwhile and an adequate Marxist account of public health requires at least some of each I think.