Marxist historiography

Part of a series on
Marxism
Theoretical works Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 The Condition of the Working Class in England The German Ideology The Communist Manifesto The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Grundrisse Capital Critique of the Gotha Programme Dialectics of Nature The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State What Is to Be Done? The Accumulation of Capital Philosophical Notebooks Terrorism and Communism The State and Revolution Essays on Marx's Theory of Value History and Class Consciousness History of the Russian Revolution Prison Notebooks The Black Jacobins On Practice Theses on the Philosophy of History Dialectic of Enlightenment A Critique of Soviet Economics The Long Revolution Guerrilla Warfare The Wretched of the Earth Reading Capital Monopoly Capital The Society of the Spectacle Pedagogy of the Oppressed Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses Ways of Seeing How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Social Justice and the City Women, Race and Class Marxism and the Oppression of Women Imagined Communities Hegemony and Socialist Strategy The Sublime Object of Ideology Time, Labor and Social Domination The Age of Extremes The Origin of Capitalism Empire Late Victorian Holocausts Change the World Without Taking Power Caliban and the Witch An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital Capitalist Realism How to Blow Up a Pipeline Capital in the Anthropocene
Philosophy Alienation Dialectical materialism Ideology Philosophy of nature Philosophy in the Soviet Union Reification
Critique of political economy Capital (accumulation) Crisis theory Commodity Concrete and abstract labor Factors of production Falling profit-rate tendency Means of production Mode of production Capitalist Socialist Productive forces Scientific socialism Surplus product Socially necessary labour time Value-form Wage labour
Sociology Base and superstructure Bourgeoisie Class Class consciousness Classless society Commodity fetishism Communist society Critical theory Cultural hegemony Democracy Dictatorship of the proletariat Soviet Radical Exploitation False consciousness Human nature Immiseration Imperialism Lumpenproletariat Metabolic rift Proletariat Private property Relations of production State theory Working class
History Class struggle Historical determinism Primitive accumulation Proletarian revolution World revolution Theory of historical trajectory
Aspects Aesthetics Archaeology Criminology Cultural analysis Cultural Studies Ethics Film theory Geography Historiography Literary criticism Marxism and religion Sociology Philosophy
Common Variants Structural Autonomist Marxism–Leninism Guevarism Maoism Titoism Trotskyism Neo-Gramscianism Regulation school Third-worldist Hegelian Budapest School Frankfurt School Humanist Neue Marx-Lektüre Open Political Praxis School Both Black Classical Communization Feminist Leninism Neo Post Western
Other Variants Analytical Austromarxism Centrist Council communism Eurocommunism Instrumental Marxism–Leninism–Maoism Nkrumaism Orthodox Revisionist Situationist Socialism with Chinese characteristics Wertkritik Workerism
People Marx Engels Morris Lafargue Kautsky Plekhanov Du Bois Connolly Lenin Luxemburg Liebknecht Kollontai Bogdanov Stalin Trotsky Grossman Zinoviev Bloch Lukács Korsch Bukharin Ho Serge Gramsci Galiev Pashukanis Bordiga Benjamin Mao Basu Mariátegui Horkheimer Dutt Brecht Marcuse Kalecki Fromm Cox Lefebvre James Adorno Padmore Sartre Deutscher Beauvoir Sombart Nkrumah Sweezy Emmanuel Hill Bettelheim Draper Jones Hobsbawm Althusser Hinton Williams Freire Mandel Sivanandan Miliband Cabral Thompson Bauman Fanon Kosik Berger Castro Guevara Liebman Heller Guattari Mészáros O'Connor Wallerstein Mies Tronti Debord Amin Hall Nairn Parenti Negri Jameson Dussel Harvey Laclau Bahro Poulantzas Vattimo Badiou Harnecker Altvater Anderson Löwy Vogel Sison Easthope Rancière Berman Przeworski Cohen Therborn Ahmad Losurdo Ture Postone Rodney Bannerji Spivak Newton Sakai Wood Federici Wolff Balibar Eagleton Kurz Hartsock Rowbotham Mouffe Geras Brenner Davis Massey Cleaver Bishop Haraway Panitch Clarke Jessop Davis Wright Fraser Burawoy Holloway Rose Screpanti Tamás Hampton Cano Žižek Berardi Sankara Hennessy McDonnell Douzinas Roediger Foster West Ghandy Marcos Heinrich Prashad Kelley Dean Lordon Linera Fisher Li Coulthard Malm Seymour Toscano Bhattacharya Moufawad-Paul Srnicek Horvat Hamza Saito
Journals Antipode Capital & Class Capitalism Nature Socialism Constellations Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory Historical Materialism Mediations Monthly Review New Left Review Race & Class Rethinking Marxism Science & Society Socialist Register
Related topics 21st-century communist theorists Anarchism Creative destruction Conflict theory Criticism of Marxism Communism Communalism Economic determinism History of communism Left-wing politics Marxian economics New Left Old Left Municipalism Political ecology Socialism Authoritarian Democratic Market Reformist Revolutionary Utopian Left-wing populism Universal class Vulgar Marxism Economism Worker cooperative Workers' council
Outline  Communism portal  Philosophy portal  Socialism portal
v t e

Marxist historiography, or historical materialist historiography, is an influential school of

Marxist historiography has made contributions to the history of the working class, and the methodology of a history from below.^[1][2][3]

Marxist historiography is sometimes criticized as

However, not all Marxist historiography is socialist. Methods from Marxist historiography, such as class analysis, can be divorced from the original political intents of Marxism and its deterministic nature; historians who use Marxist methodology, but disagree with the politics of Marxism, often describe themselves as "Marxian" historians, practitioners of this "Marxian historiography" often refer to their techniques as "Marxian".[7]

Marx and Engels

Friedrich Engels' (1820–1895) most important historical contribution to the development of Marxist historiography was Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg (The German Peasants' War, 1850), which analysed social warfare in early Protestant Germany in terms of emerging capitalist classes. Although The German Peasants' War was overdetermined and lacked a rigorous engagement with archival sources, it exemplifies an early Marxist interest in history from below and in class analysis; it also attempts a dialectical analysis.

Karl Marx (1818–1883) contributed important works on social and political history, including

The key to understanding Marxist historiography is his view of labour. For Marx "historical reality is none other than objectified labour, and all conditions of labour given by nature, including the organic bodies of people, are merely preconditions and 'disappearing moments' of the labour process."[8] This emphasis on the physical as the determining factor in history represents a break from virtually all previous historians. Until Marx developed his theory of historical materialism, the overarching determining factor in the direction of history was some sort of divine agency. In Marx's view of history "God became a mere projection of human imagination" and more importantly "a tool of oppression".^[9] There was no more sense of divine direction to be seen. History moved by the sheer force of human labour, and all theories of divine nature were a concoction of the ruling powers to keep the working people in check. For Marx, "The first historical act is... the production of material life itself."^[10] As one might expect, Marxist history not only begins with labour, it ends in production: "history does not end by being resolved into "self-consciousness" as "spirit of the spirit," but that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, a historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor..."^[11] For further, and much more comprehensive, information on this topic, see historical materialism.

Historical materialism

Introduction

Historical materialism is a

Marx's view of history is in contrast to the commonplace notion that the rise and fall of kingdoms, empires and states, can broadly be explained by the actions, ambitions and policies of the people at the top of society; kings, queens, emperors, generals, or religious leaders. This view of history is summed up by the 19th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle who wrote "the history of the world is nothing but the biography of great men". An alternative to the "great man" theory is that history is shaped by the motivating force of "great ideas" – the struggle of reason over superstition or the fight for democracy and freedom.

The "great man" and occasionally "great women" theory of history and the view that history is primarily shaped by ideas has provoked no end of debate but many historians have believed there are more fundamental patterns at play beneath historical events.^[12]

Marx asserted that the material conditions of a society's mode of production, or in Marxist terms a society's productive forces and relations of production, fundamentally determine society's organization and development including the political commitments, cultural ideas and values that dominate in any society.

Marx argues that there is a fundamental conflict between the class of people who create the wealth of society and those who have ownership or control of the means of production, decide how society's wealth and resources are to be used and have a monopoly of political and military power. Historical materialism provides a profound challenge to the view that the historical process has come to a close and that capitalism is the end of history.^[13] Since Marx's time, the theory has been modified and expanded. It now has many Marxist and non-Marxist variants.

The main modes of production that Marx identified generally include

Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

— Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 1858^[15]

Historical materialism builds upon the idea of historical

The base includes the material

forces of production such as the labour, means of production and relations of production, i.e. the social and political arrangements that regulate production and distribution. From this base rises a superstructure of legal and political "forms of social consciousness" that derive from the economic base that conditions both the superstructure and the dominant ideology of a society. Conflicts between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production provokes social revolutions, whereby changes to the economic base leads to the social transformation of the superstructure.^[25][27]

This relationship is

lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."^[28]

Marx considered recurring class conflicts as the driving force of human history as such conflicts have manifested themselves as distinct transitional stages of development in Western Europe. Accordingly, Marx designated human history as encompassing four stages of development in relations of production:

1. tribal
   societies.
2. Slave society: development of tribal to city-state in which aristocracy is born.
3. Feudalism: aristocrats are the ruling class while merchants evolve into the bourgeoisie.
4. Capitalism: capitalists are the ruling class, who create and employ the proletariat.

While historical materialism has been referred to as a materialist theory of history, Marx did not claim to have produced a master-key to history and that the materialist conception of history is not "an historico-philosophic theory of the marche générale, imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself." In a letter to editor of the Russian newspaper paper Otetchestvennye Zapiskym (1877),^[29] he explained that his ideas are based upon a concrete study of the actual conditions in Europe.^[30]

Summary

To summarize, history develops in accordance with the following observations:

1. Social progress is driven by progress in the material, productive forces a society has at its disposal (
   capital goods
   and so on)
2. Humans are inevitably involved in productive relations (roughly speaking, economic relationships or institutions), which constitute our most decisive
   social relations
   . These relations progress with the development of the productive forces. They are largely determined by the division of labour, which in turn tends to determine social class.
3. accumulation of capital
   .
4. The relations of production define the mode of production, e.g. the capitalist mode of production is characterized by the polarization of society into capitalists and workers.
5. The superstructure—the cultural and institutional features of a society, its ideological materials—is ultimately an expression of the mode of production on which the society is founded.
6. Every type of state is a powerful institution of the ruling class; the state is an instrument which one class uses to secure its rule and enforce its preferred relations of production and its exploitation onto society.^{[citation needed]}
7. State power is usually only transferred from one class to another by social and political upheaval.^{[citation needed]}
8. When a given relation of production no longer supports further progress in the productive forces, either further progress is strangled, or 'revolution' must occur.^{[citation needed]}
9. The actual historical process is not predetermined but depends on class struggle, especially the elevation of class consciousness and organization of the working class.^{[citation needed]}

Western historiography

Main article: Communist Party Historians Group

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels worked in relative isolation together outside the larger mainstream. However, by the turn of the twentieth century, Marxist thought was perhaps the most prominent opposition to the

idealist traditions.^[31]

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) was an early historian working in this tradition. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912)^[32] and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), reflected his ethical concerns and preoccupations in economic history. He was profoundly interested in the issue of the enclosure of land in the English countryside in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and Max Weber's thesis on the connection between the appearance of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. His belief in the rise of the gentry in the century before the outbreak of the Civil War in England provoked the "Storm over the Gentry" in which his methods were subjected to severe criticisms by Hugh Trevor-Roper and John Cooper.

A circle of historians inside the

The Poverty of Theory

Christopher Hill's studies on 17th-century English history were widely acknowledged and recognized as representative of Marxist historians and Marxist historiography in general.^[33] His books include Puritanism and Revolution (1958), Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965 and revised in 1996), The Century of Revolution (1961), AntiChrist in 17th-century England (1971), The World Turned Upside Down (1972) and many others.

E. P. Thompson pioneered the study of history from below in his work, The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963. It focused on the forgotten history of the first working-class political left in the world in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. In his preface to this book, Thompson set out his approach to writing history from below:

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.

Thompson's work was also significant because of the way he defined "class". He argued that class was not a structure, but a relationship that changed over time. Thompson's work is commonly considered the most influential work of history in the twentieth century and a crucial catalyst for social history and from social history to gender history and other studies of marginalized peoples.^[34] His essay, "Time, Work, Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" is also hugely influential and argues that industrial capitalism fundamentally altered (and accelerated) humans' relationship to time. He opened the gates for a generation of labour historians, such as David Montgomery (1927–2011) and Herbert Gutman (1928–1985), who made similar studies of the American working classes.

Perhaps the best known of the Communist historians was E. B. Hobsbawm (1917–2012). He is credited for establishing many of the basic historical arguments of current historiography and synthesizing huge amounts of modern historical data across time and space – most famously in his trilogy: The Age of Revolutions, The Age of Empires, and The Age of Extremes.^[35] Hobsbawm's Bandits is another example of this group's work.

C. L. R. James (1901–1989) was also a great pioneer of the 'history from below' approach. Living in Britain when he wrote his most notable work The Black Jacobins (1938), he was an anti-Stalinist Marxist and so outside of the CPGB. The Black Jacobins was the first professional historical account of the greatest and only successful slave revolt in colonial American history, the Haitian Revolution. James's history is still touted as a remarkable work of history nearly a century after publication, an immense work of historical investigation, story-telling, and creativity.^[36]

Other important British Marxist historians included Raphael Samuel (1934–1996), A. L. Morton (1903–1987), and Brian Pearce (1915–2008).

In the United States, Marxist historiography greatly influenced the history of slavery and labour history. Marxist historiography also greatly influenced

Soviet-era historiography was deeply influenced by Marxism. Marxism maintains that the moving forces of history are determined by material production and the rise of different socioeconomic formations. Applying this perspective to socioeconomic formations such as slavery and feudalism is a major methodological principle of orthodox Marxist historiography. Based on this principle, historiography predicts that there will be an abolition of capitalism by a socialist revolution made by the working class. Soviet historians believed that Marxist–Leninist theory permitted the application of categories of dialectical and historical materialism in the study of historical events.

However Soviet

The Soviet interpretation of Marxism predetermined much of the research done by historians. Research by scholars in the USSR was limited to a large extent due to this predetermination. Some Soviet historians could not offer non-Marxist theoretical explanations that did not fit with the party's official ideology for their interpretation of sources. This was true even when alternate theories had a greater explanatory power in relation to a historian's reading of source material.^[38][39]

Marx and Engels' ideas of the importance of class struggle in history, the destiny of the working class, and the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolutionary party are of major importance in Marxist methodology.

Marxist–Leninist historiography has several aspects. It explains the social basis of historical knowledge, determines the social functions of historical knowledge and the means by which these functions are carried out, and emphasizes the need to study concepts in connection with the social and political life of the period in which these concepts were developed.

It studies the theoretical and methodological features in every school of historical thought. Marxist–Leninist historiography analyses the source-study basis of a historical work, the nature of the use of sources, and specific research methods. It analyses problems of historical research as the most important sign of the progress and historical knowledge and as the expression of the socioeconomic and political needs of a historical period.

The Marxist theory of

Soviet historiography interpreted this theory to mean that the creation of the Soviet Union was the most important turning event in human history, since the USSR was considered to be the first socialist society. Furthermore, the

Soviet historians have also been criticized for a Marxist bias in the interpretation of other historical events, unrelated to the Soviet Union. Thus, for example, they assigned to the rebellions in the Roman Empire the characteristics of the social revolution.

Often, the Marxist bias and propaganda demands came into conflict: hence the peasant rebellions against the early Soviet rule, such as the Tambov Rebellion of 1920–21, were simply ignored as inconvenient politically and contradicting the official interpretation of the Marxist theories.

Notable histories include the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik), published in 1938, which was written to justify the nature of Bolshevik party life under Joseph Stalin.^[40][41] This work crystallised the piatichlenka or five acceptable moments of history in terms of vulgar dialectical materialism: primitive-communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism.

In China

Most Chinese history that is published in the People's Republic of China (PRC) is based on a Marxist interpretation of history. These theories were first applied in the 1920s by Chinese scholars such as Guo Moruo and became orthodoxy in academic study after 1949. The Marxist view of history is that history is governed by universal laws and that according to these laws, a society moves through a series of stages, with the transition between stages being driven by class struggle.^[42] These stages are:

• Slave society
• Feudal society
• Capitalist society
• Socialist society
• The world communist society

The official historical view within the People's Republic of China associates each of these stages with a particular era in Chinese history.

• Slave society – Xia to Shang
• Feudal society (decentralized) – Zhou to Sui
• Feudal society (bureaucratic) – Tang to the First Opium War
• Feudal society (semi-colonial) – First Opium War to end of Qing dynasty
• Capitalist society – Republican era
• Socialist society –
  PRC
  1949 to present

Because of the strength of the Chinese Communist Party and the importance of the Marxist interpretation of history in legitimizing its rule, it was for many years difficult for historians within the PRC to actively argue in favour of non-Marxist and anti-Marxist interpretations of history. However, this political restriction is less confining than it may first appear in that the Marxist historical framework is surprisingly flexible, and it is a rather simple matter to modify an alternative historical theory to use language that at least does not challenge the Marxist interpretation of history.^[43]

Partly because of the interest of Mao Zedong, historians in the 1950s took a special interest in the role of peasant rebellions in Chinese history and compiled documentary histories to examine them.^[44]

There are several problems associated with imposing Marx's European-based framework on Chinese history. First, slavery existed throughout China's history but never as the primary form of labour. While the

The Japanese scholar Tanigawa Michio, writing in the 1970s and 1980s, set out to revise the generally Marxist views of China prevalent in post-war Japan. Tanigawa writes that historians in Japan fell into two schools. One held that China followed the set European pattern which Marxists thought to be universal; that is, from ancient slavery to medieval feudalism to modern capitalism; while another group argued that "Chinese society was extraordinarily saturated with stagnancy, as compared to the West" and assumed that China existed in a "qualitatively different historical world from Western society". That is, there is an argument between those who see "unilinear, monistic world history" and those who conceive of a "two-tracked or multi-tracked world history". Tanigawa reviewed the applications of these theories in Japanese writings about Chinese history and then tested them by analysing the Six Dynasties 220–589 CE period, which Marxist historians saw as feudal. He concluded that China did not have feudalism in the sense that Marxists use, that Chinese military governments did not lead to a European-style military aristocracy. The period established social and political patterns which shaped China's history from that point on.^[45]

There was a gradual relaxation of Marxist interpretation after the death of Mao in 1976,

B. N. Datta and D. D. Kosambi are considered the founding fathers of Marxist historiography in India. D. D. Kosambi, a polymath, viewed Indian History from a Marxist viewpoint. The other Indian scholars of Marxian historiography are R. S. Sharma, Irfan Habib, D. N. Jha, and K. N. Panikkar.^[47] Other historians such as Satish Chandra, Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, Arjun Dev, and Dineshchandra Sircar, are sometimes referred to as "influenced by the marxian approach to history."^[48]

The Marxian historiography of India has focused on studies of economic development, land ownership, and

The Marxian school of Indian historiography is accused of being too ideologically influenced.[49] B. R. Ambedkar criticized Marxists, as he deemed them to be unaware or ignorant of the specifics of caste issues.^[60][61] Many have alleged that Marxian historians used

Marxist historiography has had an enormous influence on historiography, and compares with empiricist historiography as one of the basic and foundational historiographic methodologies. Most non-Marxist historians make use of tools developed within Marxist historiography, like dialectical analysis of social formations, class analysis, or the project of broadening the scope of history into social history. Marxist historiography provided the first sustained efforts at social history, and is still highly influential within this area. The contribution of class analysis has also led to the development of gender and race as other analytical tools.

Marxism was one of the key influences on the Annales school tradition of French historiography.^[67]

See also

• Alltagsgeschichte
• Cleometrics
• Mode of production
• Historical materialism
• Philosophy of history
• Historical determinism
• Historicism

References