Marxist historiography
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Marxist or historical materialist historiography is a school of historiography influenced by Marxism. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography are the centrality of social class and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes.
Marxist historiography has made contributions to the history of the working class, oppressed nationalities, and the methodology of history from below. The chief problematic aspect of Marxist historiography has been an argument on the nature of history as determined or dialectical; this can also be stated as the relative importance of subjective and objective factors in creating outcomes.
Marxist history is generally teleological, in that it posits a direction of history, towards an end state of history as classless human society. Marxist historiography, that is, the writing of Marxist history in line with the given historiographical principles, is generally seen as a tool. Its aim is to bring those oppressed by history to self-consciousness, and to arm them with tactics and strategies from history: it is both a historical and a liberatory project.
Historians who use Marxist methodology, but disagree with the mainstream of Marxism, often describe themselves as marxist historians (with a lowercase M). Methods from Marxist historiography, such as class analysis, can be divorced from the liberatory intent of Marxist historiography; such practitioners often refer to their work as marxian or Marxian.
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[edit] Marx and Engels
Frederick Engels's most important historical contribution was Der deutsche Bauernkrieg (The German Peasants War), which analysed social warfare in early protestant Germany in terms of emerging capitalist classes. The German Peasants War is overdetermined and lacks a rigorous engagement with archival sources. It does however indicate the Marxist interest in history from below and class analysis, and it attempts a dialectical analysis.
Marx's most important works on social and political history include The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Communist Manifesto, and The German Ideology.
[edit] Marxist historiography in the Soviet Union
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For more details on this topic, see Soviet historiography.
Marxist historiography suffered in the Soviet Union, as the government requested overdetermined historical writing. Marxist historians tended to avoid contemporary history (history after 1905) where possible and effort was predominantly directed at premodern history. As history was considered to be a politicised academic discipline, historians limited their creative output to avoid prosecution.
Notable histories include the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik), published in the 1930s, which was written in order to justify the nature of Bolshevik party life under Joseph Stalin.
[edit] Marxist historiography in East and South Asia
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In China, Marxist historians argue that the land distribution system became more and more injust over time.
In India, Marxist historiography was very influential. Its main representatives are Irfan Habib, and K. N. Panikkar[citation needed]. Even non academic and lay men contributions are there in this area from India. The book written in Malayalam, regional language of Kerala, Coffee Housinte Katha or The Story of Coffee House, by one of the leaders of the Indian Coffee House Movement, Nadakkal Parameswaran Pillai, is an example for this. A further issue in Indian history concerning Marxists in particular is the debate on feudalism in Indian History. Largely a debate began by historians with Marxian tendancys. Notably D.D Kosambi in his earlier works in the 1960's, Kosambi outlined the notion of 'feudalism from below and feudalism from above'. Interestingly this element of his feudalism thesis was rejected by another apparent marxist historian. The notable R.S Sharma, who ultimately authored Indian historiographys most significant monograph work on the subject Indian Feudalism.
[edit] The Great Britain's Communist Party Historians Group
A circle of historians inside the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) formed in 1946. They shared a common interest in 'history from below' and class structure in early capitalist society. While some members of the group (most notably Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson) left the CPGB after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the common points of British Marxist historiography continued in their works. They placed a great emphasis on the subjective determination of history. E. P. Thompson famously engaged Althusser in The Poverty of Theory, arguing that Althusser's theory overdetermined history, and left no space for historical revolt by the oppressed.
Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class is one of the works commonly associated with this group. Eric Hobsbawm's Bandits is another example of this group's work.
C.L.R. James was also a great pioneer of the 'history from below' approach. While he was in Britain when he wrote his classic work The Black Jacobins (1938), he was an anti-Stalinist Marxist and so outside of the CPGB.
[edit] The effect of Marxist historiography
While the analysis of social formations and the broadening of history to include social aspects can be linked to Marxist historiography, its only novel contribution is that of class analysis which has led to the development of gender and race as other analytical tools.
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- Perry Anderson, In the tracks of Historical Materialism.
- Paul Blackledge, Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (2006)
- Deciphering the past International Socialism 112 (2006)
