WHAT IF? THE PLEASURES AND PERILS
OF COUNTERFACTUAL HISTORY

Marx famously credited humans with a distinctive capacity: to raise structures in our imaginations before we raise them in reality (in comparing "the worst of architects [with] the best of bees," Capital I, ch. vii, sect. 1). So we can, and indeed should, apply this capacity when we think about history: what if events had gone differently in the past? How might present-day realities be changed? These are extremely useful questions for historical materialists, since the most common caricature of Marxist historical theory sees it as proposing a single, and inevitable, path of social progress, and denying any space for accident and contingency.

The challenge was forcefully stated with the recent publication of a remarkable collection, edited by Robert Cowley: What If? Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1999, 2001).¹ This volume, of almost 850 pages, combines two prior publications, What If? and What If?2; it also contains sidebar articles that appeared originally in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. The focus is quite typically "centric," in the manner common among mainstream historians, with the emphasis on classical antiquity, Europe and the "West." Each of the original books was organized chronologically, from the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean up to the present. No attempt was made to integrate the articles into a single chronological frame in the combined volume, so you can take a 3000-year journey through history twice: from antiquity to today, back to the beginning, and forward again.

The central theme running through the many contributions is quite simple: if some little event had gone differently (either a battle — the military looms quite large in this paradigm — or the fate of an important individual), the entire shape of world, or ancient, or Western, society would be profoundly altered. This is best conveyed by examples, and I must resist the temptation to tell too many of the stories. But I will tell a few. (To save space, I will not identify individual authors or chapters; it's all in the book.)

The naval battle between the Greeks and the Persians at Salamis, in 480 B.C., ended with a Greek victory, in which the swifter and more numerous fleet of the Persian emperor Xerxes was destroyed. The victory depended on a subtle maneuver advocated by the Athenian philosopher-admiral, Themistocles; had he not prevailed over those advocating other strategies, a Persian victory was all but certain. This, in turn, would have squelched the emerging Greek conceptions of freedom and the individual, and the Greek city-states would have remained outposts of "Eastern" religious despotism. "Whatever we may think of the great strengths of, or dangers in, present-day Western culture . . . that mobile and dynamic tradition is also due to Themistocles' September victory off Salamis" (35).

Alexander the Great was almost killed at the Battle of the Granicus River, in Northwest Anatolia, in 334 B.C., when he was 22 years old. He was saved by one of his bodyguards, Cleitus, after which the young Macedonian king led his troops to victory over a Persian-Anatolian force. Alexander lived another ten years, during which Macedonian, and therefore Athenian, predominance was secured. The alternative was a Roman-Persian alliance that would have favored Eastern backwardness and despotism over the Greek trope toward Western civilization. "And so, if Cleitus had stumbled as he hastened to save his king, we would inhabit a world very different from our own in terms of geopolitics, religion and culture. . . . A profound reverence for tradition, ancestors and social hierarchy — rather than Greek reverence for freedom, political equality and the dignity of the person — defined the ethical values of a small 'cosmopolitan' elite," which would have forestalled any "long and brilliant 'Hellenistic Period'" (55).

The Romans fare much better in the next chapter, however. Here we are asked to imagine that 15,000 Roman troops (plus camp followers) had not been slaughtered, and had not had their heads nailed to trees, by the German tribesmen led by Arminius in the Teutoburg Forest, in 9 A.D. Suppose instead that the Roman generals had won this battle, and subdued Germany, which would then not have remained one of Europe's last frontiers, with a corresponding "frontier mentality." "What if Arminius had not become a kind of Shanelike figure but just another co-opted local prince? What if the Roman Empire, with its temples, amphitheaters, and systems of law, had extended to the Vistula? Would we have ever considered the dire prospect of a 'German Question'?" (58).

In 1241 A.D., a force was massing outside the gates of Vienna, of a type that Europeans had not seen previously. These were the Mongols, organized in powerful armies with unprecedented mobility, discipline and firepower. Their use of horses and their skill as horsemen made them particularly dangerous. They had already marched across Russia, Poland and Hungary, and elsewhere in central Europe, laying waste to land and people. There was nothing in Europe at the time that could have stopped their advance and dominion, all the way to the Atlantic and the British Isles. And yet, suddenly, in early 1242, they withdrew, and Europe ("Christendom" — p. 105) was spared! The reason: the third son of the great Genghiz Khan, Ogadai, died, and news of his death reached the Mongol armies in the West by courier. "The Mongols remained nomad tribesmen, bound by a personal loyalty to their chiefs. When the khan died, their law required them to go in person back to their heartland to elect a new khan" (105). After this withdrawal, the Mongols never were able to return to the offensive in the West, except for a few skirmishes in Persia, Egypt and other Arab states. Their focus turned to China, Vietnam, and Japan, in all of which they were eventually repulsed. But the counterfactual nightmare remains: what if Ogadai had not died? All of Europe would have become part of the Mongol empire. We would now be speaking Mongolian, perhaps inflected by elements from the Germanic and Romance languages, much as American English is enriched with words from Native American languages.

One of my favorites requires that we fast forward to World War II, and the Pacific theater. This story involves modern warfare, and cryptography. The Battle of Midway Island, June 4, 1942, was a bloody affair on both sides, but it was the last time the Japanese ever went on the offensive in the Pacific, and therefore overall a U. S. victory. Had the Japanese conquered Midway (a U. S. installation), attacks on Guam, Hawaii, and the U. S. west coast might well have followed, and the entire course of the war might have been very different. And now, the story.

In the months leading up to the battle, U. S. military intelligence was trying to crack Japanese transmissions. One place name in the decrypted Japanese texts was identified as "AF," but the U. S. authorities could not be sure what "AF" was. If "AF" referred to Midway, it was crucial to know this with certainty; the U. S. military could then determine not only Japanese plans, but also locations of ships, submarines, supplies, etc. So the Pearl Harbor Navy's Combat Intelligence Unit did an "op": it ordered Midway Island to send a radio message, on an open frequency, to Pearl Harbor, stating that their condenser had broken down and that they would soon be out of fresh water. Pearl Harbor responded, also in the open, that a water barge was on its way. Shortly thereafter, an encrypted Japanese message was intercepted, and decoded: "AF is running short of water." Thus it was established: AF = Midway! It is the stuff of which movies are — and have been — made. "The rest is history."

Now, the counterfactual element. Here I can't resist imagining this in my own way; the language of the following exchange does not appear in the book. What if a Japanese signal corpsman had risen from his desk, removed his earphones, and said: "Sir! Permission to speak, sir!" His superior officer responds with the Japanese equivalent of: "What is it, maggot?!" "Sir! Why would the Americans have used an open channel?, sir! Do you think they may be up to something?, sir!" And if the officer agrees, and passes the question on up the line, the Japanese wind up getting the advantage at Midway, conquering Hawaii ("lei's for the emperor" — that is in the book, p. 330), and attacking California. Resources are diverted from Europe, and — here it gets murky: Hitler keeps Austria and Poland? The USSR's Red Army enters Italy and France? You get the picture.

So, what are we to make of all this?

There are actually two different "what if?" narratives. The more rigorous version states that literally anything can happen in history; that "history is just one damn thing after another." But in this form the counterfactual wasp loses its sting. If, for example, the Persians had won the battle of Salamis, Themistocles might have re-founded Athens on the Italian peninsula (as the author of that chapter indeed speculates). Energy from one lost battle re-emerges elsewhere. A Roman victory at Teutoburg results in earlier (than actual) German unification, and the "German Question" appears sooner, and with greater consequences. A Japanese victory at Midway and subsequent drive eastward diverts resources from Thailand, Malaysia, Australia and elsewhere, resulting in Allied losses there. "Anything can happen" weakens the impact of "what if."

So the stronger version of the counterfactual enterprise puts other determinisms in place, often with considerable subtlety. The author of the Salamis chapter, for example, is at pains to argue that the Persians could not have been defeated in any other battle; Salamis was the Greeks' only opportunity. Had Alexander not lived to build a Macedonian Empire, no one and nothing else could have emerged to replace him. The individualist culture that flowered in the Greek city-states and became the "taproot of Western civilization" could not have emerged anywhere else. The "what if" dogma, therefore, is not about the much more sensible inquiry into contingency and accident determining the time, place and details of an eventual historical development (we can ignore, for the moment, the matter of whether the development under consideration is the emergence of "Western civilization" or of capitalism), with the prerequisites for that development maturing in diverse conditions across large expanses of geographical and social territory. The "inner spark," so to speak, exists only in a single culture, or even in a single individual. The horror of the negative counterfactual takes flight only as a result of this profoundly elitist, mystical, idealist, and largely unexamined postulate.

Suppose the great khan Ogadai lives in 1242 A.D., instead of dying. Europe is laid waste by the Mongol Empire. The Mongol chieftains now either remain or they leave. If they leave, the societies of the late Middle Ages resume the course of their development, with smaller population (the Black Death will soon do as much damage as the Mongols would have done), but with the level and quality of productive forces and emerging social relations, especially those associated with commodity production, that had previously evolved there. This socioeconomic matrix is the ultimate foundation for the political transformations with which we are familiar — however much some historians like to trace these back to Alexander (or his tutor, Aristotle) and Themistocles!

If the Mongols remain, they must (whether they know it or not) develop methods of organizing production, extracting and distributing surplus, evolving ideological forms that work at the level of technical and social development then achieved. We may, if we wish, assume that the new horizons of power and wealth made possible by the more advanced European levels of development will enter the consciousness of some sectors among the Mongol overlords. We can then anticipate the emergence of some form of the thinking of Machiavelli, Luther and Voltaire, only not in Italian, German and French this time, but in their Mongolian equivalents!

Or: perhaps the Mongol tribesmen hate and fear everything they don't know, from intensive agriculture to mechanical clocks and printed books, to the extent that they destroy it all. In that case, progress toward capitalism, and beyond, could well come to an end on this planet! Historical materialism highlights a directionality that is present in the potentials of human development; it does not predict our ultimate success in traveling this road.

More realistically, however, the loss of Europe to social progress might redound to the advantage of Asia, in which case the first shoots of pre-capitalist commerce and then full-blown capitalism emerge in China, Japan, India and the Philippines. We might then have the spectacle of observing scientific-humanist social theory (it would not be called "Marxist," of course) growing up within the Asian capitalist political cultures and seeking to emancipate itself from the vestiges of "Asia-centrism." While progressive thinkers strive to develop truly universal theory reflecting the realities of both Asia and the Third World (i.e., Europe and North America), we may still anticipate the authoring of elegant and erudite books, in Mongolian to be sure, such as What If?, in which historians ponder questions such as: what if we had not been able to stop the European hordes in the 11th-13th centuries (they called themselves "Great Crusaders") from pushing beyond Jerusalem into Central Asia, and from there all the way to the Pacific, in the process destroying the unique Eastern "spark" of "individuality" and "freedom," indeed all of "Mongoldom"?

D. L.

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ANNETTE T. RUBINSTEIN

April 12, 1910 — June 20, 2007

We present below Editorial Board member Gerald Meyer's eloquent summary of the life of Annette Rubinstein, who was a mainstay of Science & Society for over four decades. The brief remembrance that follows, by David Laibman, was delivered at the Memorial Meeting held at the Brecht Forum on September 23, 2007.

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On June 20, 2007 at 3 a.m., Annette T. Rubinstein — one of the most stalwart and admirable luminaries of the American left — passed away.

Annette T. Rubinstein spent her entire life immersed in political and intellectual work on the left. Her involvements were many. Science & Society's Editorial Board is proud that our journal was high on her list. She served as a member of the Editorial Board from 1964 until her death, and authored more than 50 articles and book reviews published in the journal. She played a leading role in sustaining this Marxist quarterly. Her first contribution to Science & Society, which appeared in the Summer 1942 issue, was a one-page book note on a history of the American public school system. (This also happened to be her first publication — ever.) Her last publication in S&S, which appeared in Spring 2005, was "Revisiting the New Left," a review article of an anthology on the political movements of the 1960s. (This review article happened to be her last published writing.) These two articles illustrate the breadth of topics about which she wrote. Her area of special expertise, however, was literary criticism, a discipline to which, with excellent results, she applied Marxist methodology. Science & Society published two of her best works in this area: "Bourgeois Equality in Shakespeare" (Spring, 1977); and "Lenin on Literature, Language, and Censorship" (Summer, 1995).

Born in 1910 in Manhattan to ardently socialist parents, Annette spent her entire life as a part of the American left. While ensuring that their four children imbibed a heady mix of egalitarianism and secular Judaism, Abraham and Jean Rubinstein also insisted that they train their minds for a more meaningful life and professional work. At 24 years of age, Annette graduated from Columbia University with a doctorate in philosophy. She obtained a one-year appointment to teach philosophy at New York University, which was not renewed the following year by the department's new chair, Sidney Hook. Unfortunately, the deadly combination of anti-Semitism and the Great Depression prevented Annette from obtaining an academic appointment. (At the very least, this would have required her to anglicize her name.)

Unable to bear seeing his brilliant daughter denied work appropriate to her educational achievement, in 1934 Abraham purchased for $1,000, at a bank foreclosure, the rights to the Robert Louis Stevenson High School. This small sum represented the collective savings of her family, whose business ventures had crumbled due to the economic disturbances preceding the crash. After recruiting sufficient students and paying down the massive debts of the nearly defunct institution, Annette served for the next 19 years as its principal. The school provided employment for her mother, who taught math, and her three siblings (Irwin, Ruth Jean, and Leo), who served in capacities ranging from administrator to counselor. The family lived in studio apartments carved out of the top floor of the school buildings, which were located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

During the very short interim between the completion of her doctoral dissertation and the reopening of Robert Lewis Stevenson, Annette worked for the Home Relief Bureau as an investigator in a mixed Jewish-Italian community in the East New York district of Brooklyn. Equipped with only a somewhat rarefied version of socialism, Annette was rudely confronted with the depredations of capitalism in crisis. In her first year on the job, three fathers from her caseload, ashamed and despondent, committed suicide. Not surprisingly, Annette was drawn to the Communists at her workplace, who were simultaneously organizing a union and informing their clients of their rights.

Within a short time, Annette and her mother had joined the Communist Party. They worked in a series of overlapping organizations and causes led by the Party, especially the Unemployed Councils, which fought evictions and lobbied to obtain Home Relief for families. Annette also taught courses on literature and public speaking at the Communist Party's educational institutions, the School for Democracy, and its successor the Jefferson School for Social Science. For the next 70 years, a combination of practical political activity and left intellectual work typified her modus vivendi.

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1. The wording of the subtitle is from the dust jacket. The title page has "imagining" in place of "imagine"; I assume the latter was intended. My own comparatively meager attempt at counterfactual history appeared in "Editorial Perspectives" for January, 2006. Entitled "Red Butterflies Flap Their Wings: A Parallel Twentieth Century," this aroused a storm of commentary, reviewed subsequently in "A Tiny Red Butterfly Wing Flap," October 2006.

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