Letters from Tomis

Thirteenth in a series of reflections on my thoughts after reading What is Marxism: An Introduction into Marxist Theory by Rob Sewell and Alan Woods. The thoughts, opinions, and any errors are mine alone.

History has always been punctuated by events that defy our expectations and undo our most cherished narratives. I firmly believe that the great forces of history in our class societies are the economic relations of production–its true drivers. Yet lurking within this grand architecture is an uninvited guest: the historical accident. It is this element of contingency, this chaotic and often absurd intervention, that subverts our carefully constructed interpretations and reminds us of the scaffolding base upon which history is built.

Accident, of course, is an unsatisfying explanation. It feels inadequate to attribute monumental shifts to chance. How else are we to explain the seemingly trivial events that alter the course of nations? Take, for instance, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914—a moment whose absurdity is matched only by its consequences. A chauffeur’s wrong turn in Sarajevo delivered the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne into the hands of a teenage assassin. What followed was a war that devoured empires, redrew continents, and set the stage for the most calamitous century in human history. Can we seriously suggest that this was inevitable? Or must we concede that the hinge of history sometimes swings on trivialities?

As historians, investigating the structural order that lies under our capitalist chaos, we may dismisses such moments as anomalies, as mere triggers of underlying tensions. The First World War was indeed the result of deep-seated imperial rivalries among the European powers. To reduce the assassination to a mere pretext is to ignore the profound role of accident in shaping outcomes. What if the Archduke’s car had not stalled? What if Gavrilo Princip had missed his mark? These “what-ifs” are not idle speculation; they underscore the precariousness of historical processes.

Consider another example: the weather. Napoleon’s catastrophic retreat from Moscow and Hitler’s failure at Stalingrad are often framed as failures of strategy, but they were also failures of climate forecasting. The Russian winter, that merciless arbiter of imperial hubris, decided the fate of both campaigns. Here, again, we see the interplay of accident and design. Napoleon and Hitler were architects of their own destruction, but they were also at the mercy of forces beyond their control. In such moments, the grand narratives of history collapse into the banal: a cold snap, a misjudged supply line, a frozen river.

Yet it would be wrong to view accident as a purely external force, as something imposed upon history from without. It is often the product of human frailty, of the contradictions and unpredictabilities that define our species. The Cuban Missile Crisis, that nerve-wracking dance on the edge of annihilation, was riddled with accidents: a U-2 spy plane straying into Soviet airspace, a miscommunication between Washington and Moscow, and the near-launch of a Soviet submarine torpedo. The survival of the human race during those thirteen days was not the result of rational decision-making but of sheer, dumb luck.

The role of accident in history also has a paradoxical quality. It both undermines and reinforces the agency of individuals. On the one hand, it reminds us that even the most powerful figures are subject to forces beyond their control. On the other hand, it underscores the disproportionate impact of individual actions. Imagine, if you will, that Lenin had not returned to Russia in April 1917, courtesy of a sealed train provided by the German government. Would the Bolshevik Revolution have succeeded without him? Perhaps. But history suggests otherwise. Lenin’s presence was not just catalytic; it was decisive. And that presence, like so much else, hinged on historical accident.

Of course, it is tempting to view such moments as aberrations, as deviations from the underlying logic of history. But this is a comforting delusion. Accident is not the exception; it is the rule. History is not just a linear progression from primitive communism to slave society to feudal kingdoms to bourgeois capitalism, but a series of contingent events, a chaotic interplay of forces that often resist easy categorization–especially for the bourgeois historian. This does not mean that history is meaningless or that its patterns are illusory. It means only that these patterns are subject to disruption by the unpredictable and the absurd. History moves in “herks and jerks”, now progressive, then reactionary.

We crave order, a sense of control over the past and, by extension, the future. The idea that history is governed partly by chance, by the random intersection of events and individuals, acting as catalyst for underlying, overdetermined necessary processes, can be profoundly unsettling to our individualist culture. It suggests that our grand projects and ideologies are vulnerable to some small degree to the caprices of fate, that the arc of history does not necessarily always bend toward justice. Unfortunately…

And yet, there is something liberating in this recognition. To acknowledge the role of accident is to embrace the unpredictability of the human condition. It is to accept that history is a chaotic drama, full of twists and reversals that defy our expectations, but in the end is overdetermined by the underlying relationships of production and reproduction. This does not absolve us of responsibility; on the contrary, it heightens it. In a world governed by necessity and chance, our choices matter more, not less. The accidents of history are not merely things that happen to us; they are things we create, often unwittingly, through our actions and inactions.

In the end, the role of accident in history is both humbling and empowering. It reminds us that we are not the perfect masters of our fate–that we are participants in a drama whose outcome is never perfectly foreordained. For we can be the catalyst for this change and revolution. And that, I think, is as good a reason as any to keep playing our parts.