Marxist historiography
Marxist historiography, or historical materialist historiography, is an influential school of historiography. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography include the centrality of social class, social relations of production in class-divided societies that struggle against each other, and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes (historical materialism). Marxist historians follow the tenets of the development of class-divided societies, especially modern capitalist ones.
Yet, the way Marxist historiography has developed in different regional and political contexts has varied. Marxist historiography has had unique trajectories of development in the West, the Soviet Union, and in India, as well as in the pan-Africanist and African-American traditions, adapting to these specific regional and political conditions in different ways.
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 deterministic,[4][5][6] in that it posits a direction of history, towards an end state of history as classless human society. Marxist historiography within Marxist circles is generally seen as a tool; its aim is to bring those it perceives as oppressed by history to self-consciousness, and to arm them with tactics and strategies from history. For these Marxists, it is both a historical and a liberatory project.
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[edit]
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 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), The Communist Manifesto (1848), The German Ideology (written in 1845, published in 1932), and those chapters of Das Kapital (1867–1894) dealing with the historical emergence of capitalists and proletarians from pre-industrial English society.
Labour and class struggle[edit]
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[edit]
Introduction[edit]
Historical materialism is a methodology to understand human societies and their development throughout history. Marx's theory of history locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labour together to make their livelihoods. Marx argues that the introduction of new technologies and new ways of doing things to improve production eventually lead to new social classes which in turn result in political crises which can threaten the established order.
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 "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 primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, mercantilism, and capitalism. In each of these social stages, people interacted with nature and production in different ways. Any surplus from that production was distributed differently as well. To Marx, ancient societies (e.g. Rome and Greece) were based on a ruling class of citizens and a class of slaves; feudalism was based on nobles and serfs; and capitalism based on the capitalist class (bourgeoisie) and the working class (proletariat).
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:
The official historical view within the People's Republic of China associates each of these stages with a particular era in Chinese history.
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 Zhou and earlier dynasties may be labeled as feudal, later dynasties were much more centralized than how Marx analysed their European counterparts as being. To account for the discrepancy, Chinese Marxists invented the term "bureaucratic feudalism". The placement of the Tang as the beginning of the bureaucratic phase rests largely on the replacement of patronage networks with the imperial examination. Some world-systems analysts, such as Janet Abu-Lughod, claim that analysis of Kondratiev waves shows that capitalism first arose in Song dynasty China, although widespread trade was subsequently disrupted and then curtailed.
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,[46] which was accelerated after the Tian'anmen Square protest and other revolutions in 1989, which damaged Marxism's ideological legitimacy in the eyes of Chinese academics.
In India[edit]
In India Marxist historiography takes the form of Marxian historiography where Marxian techniques of analysis are used but Marxist political intentions and prescriptions are discarded.
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 class conflict in precolonial India and deindustrialization during the colonial period.[49]
One debate in Indian history that relates to a historical materialist schema is on the nature of feudalism in India. D. D. Kosambi in the 1960s outlined the idea of "feudalism from below" and "feudalism from above". Element of his feudalism thesis was rejected by R. S. Sharma in his monograph Indian Feudalism (2005) and various other books,[50][51][52][53][54] However R. S. Sharma also largely agrees with Kosambi in his various other books.[55][56][57][58] Most Indian Marxian historians argue that the economic origins of communalism are feudal remnants and the economic insecurities caused by slow development in India.[59]
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 negationism to whitewash some of the atrocities committed by Muslim rulers in the Indian Subcontinent.[62][63][64][65] Since the late 1990s, Hindu nationalist scholars especially have polemicized against the Marxian tradition in India for neglecting what they believe to be the country's 'illustrious past' based on Vedic-puranic chronology. An example of such works is Arun Shourie's Eminent Historians (1998).[66]
The effects of Marxist historiography[edit]
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]