Analysis of Marxist Historiography

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History is mutable; all historians are, despite attempts to avoid it, a product of their own historical contexts. So since the beginning of the study of history, there have always been different theories and methods used to approach it. Moreover, as social and cultural beliefs have changed, these theories and methodologies have changed as well. The last two hundred years especially have seen a significant increase in changing ideas, views of history, and techniques used to approach it, which have in turn encouraged the development of further new approaches to gain a more comprehensive understanding of history. Theories about society, economics, and politics often provide the context in which a new approach to history is created. One such theory is Marxist economic and political theory. This theory and its subsequent approach to history have had such a significant influence on historical writing that much of modern historical scholarship can not be ‘fully appreciated without some understanding of Karl Marx’s ideas’. This essay aims to demonstrate the different ways in which Marxist Economic and Political theory has influenced the creation of newer approaches to history, such as economic history, cultural history, and women’s and gender histories, and how they compare to Marxist historiography.

Marxism

To understand how Marxist theory has influenced historical writing, it is necessary to have an understanding of the theory itself. Marxist economic and political theory, popularised in the mid-19th Century, is a method of socioeconomic analysis named after Karl Marx, who first described it in his 1848 pamphlet, the Communist Manifesto. This doctrine initially consisted of three parts: an economic and political theory, a philosophical anthropology, and the theory of Historical Materialism. Marxism holds that capitalist society is divided into two main classes, namely the upper-class capitalist bourgeoisie who control society's means of production, and the lower class, the proletariat who work for the bourgeoisie. Marxist theory holds that the relationship between these two classes is inherently exploitive, therefore creating a constant struggle between the two, and that this struggle defines all economic and political relations within a capitalist society and will eventually lead to a proletariat revolution in favor of the inevitable socialism.

Marxist economic

The most obvious type of historical writing influenced by Marxist economic and political theory is Marxist historiography. Marxism, having accused older approaches to history of focusing too narrowly on individual great men or leaders, developed a bottom-up approach to history that prioritizes understanding the perspectives and experiences of ordinary people, rather than ‘great men’. The work of influential Marxist historians such as E. P. Thompson continued this broadening of perspectives with works such as ‘The Making of the English Working Class’, published in the early 1960s. Using previously ignored documentary remains, Thompson outlined cultures of ordinary, working-class people, telling previously forgotten and ignored histories of working-class life during the late-18th to early-19th centuries. According to Emma Griffin, a professor of modern history at the University of East Anglia, Thompson’s book was so influential that it represented a turning point in the writing of history. As Griffin suggests, Thompson brought to light ‘aspects of human experience which had never before had their historian’, using documentation that ‘others had regarded as scraps from the archive’, to gain a fuller understanding of the ordinary human’s experience. In this way, he popularised a scientific approach to history developed later by social history and emulated Marxism’s systematic observation and deductive reasoning to reach its conclusions. In addition to this, by showing older approaches to be ‘neglecting the broader context in which [history] operated’, Marxist theory influenced historical writing by extending its viewpoint from purely political to wider society, consequently requiring an emphasis on the border context which Marxism sees as being economics. Like the theory, Marxist historiography understands history as being centered around different class struggles, arguing that the ‘mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and intellectual processes’ of a period. This understanding relies on the structuralist Marxist theory that capitalism is an impersonal structure controlling human agency, implying that every historical epoch can be viewed in terms of its dominant productive forces. Similarly, Marxist Historical writing also relies on the Marxist economic determinist notion that the economy is the main force for change in history. In this way, Marxist economic and political theory influenced the broadening of historical writing by demonstrating the previously ignored importance of economic forces to history. This emphasis on economic forces triggered the beginning of a similar approach to writing history in the late 19th century, also influenced by a Marxist social and political theory called economic history. This approach studies how past economies have changed, the factors that influence their development, and emphasize the value of historical context. Marxist economic and political theory has clearly influenced economic historical writing as, according to Jon S. Cohen, in the Journal of Economic History, most economic historians adhere to the Marxist notion that every historical era is shaped by its predominant means of production and how the forces of production are distributed and held. Similarly, advocators of economic historical writing such as Joseph Schumpeter, Max Weber, and Sir William Ashley, influenced by Marxism’s economic determinism argued that analysis of human actions, historical context, and ‘the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth’ was key to historical analysis. Marxist and Economic histories are a great example of how many disciplines within history are heavily reliant on one another; economic history, for example, has been so heavily influenced by Marxist historiography and its methods, that many of its key historians are self-proclaimed Marxists.

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Sociocultural

With the rise of social democratic politics and the increasing popularity of Marxism, in the aftermath of the second world war, came Social History as an extension of economic history satisfying the increasing need for an intellectual addition to ‘the larger idea of the social.’ Social history, started off as a bottom-up approach, (another example of the influence of Marxist methodology) studying conflicts that arose due to industrialization and focusing particularly on social issues, classes, and socialism attempting to understand objective patterns in social classes and the lived experience of the working class and their champions. ‘The Marxist influence on social history was substantial and long-lasting’ however, it began to be considered increasingly anachronistic and gave way to a more liberating approach which held more ‘potential for exciting new avenues to be explored’, Cultural History. Cultural history, popular from the 1980s onwards, also makes use of a bottom-up approach to history like the Marxist historiography albeit with a larger focus on analyzing the emotions, images, and sense of identity held by people in the past rather than their lives from an economic perspective. Where Cultural history differs from Marxist historiography is that it is not purely focused on a bottom-up approach; cultural history also looks at high cultures such as literature, art and clothing, music, politics, armies, and courts. In this way, cultural history provides a thick description of history by attempting to uncover ambiguities, meanings, or subtle nuances. This allows cultural history to reject the predominantly economic determinist and materialist perspectives of historical writing such as Economic and Marxist historiographies in favor of analyzing the deeper cultural meanings behind a text, event, or epoch. However, according to Dr. P. Prayer, Elmo Raj Cultural is still influenced to some extent by influenced by Marxist economic and social theories as it has a similar critique of power as Marxist theory as being exploitive, showing that despite rejecting some of the Marxist ideas, social and cultural historical writing are still largely influenced by Marxist economic and political theories.

Women’s and Gender

Women’s and Gender history have also been influenced by Marxist political and economic theory. An offshoot of cultural history, women’s and gender histories attempt to approach history from the perspective of women, analyzing the contributions of women to history and the meaning and formation of gender in the past. Pre-women’s history, the majority of history recorded about women had the same issues Marxist historians noticed about older historiographies; it centered heavily around great men, or in this case, great women. The focus was entirely on ‘society matrons’, women doing what men would typically do while happening to be a woman, and woman’s life in the public sphere while neglecting their lives in the private sphere. With the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, Women’s historians began to apply the Marxist criticism of older historiography being too narrowly emphasizing leaders and elites and dismissing the role of women. Some took it even further, criticizing Marxist historians for focusing too heavily on class inequality and not heavily enough on the impact of race and gender. Joan Wallach Scott (a professor of Social Science at Princeton University) for example, suggested that E. P. Thompson's approach in ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ was ‘androcentric’ and failed to see the importance of gender to the working-class identity. Despite this, many women’s historians still ‘attribute the most dramatic changes in women’s historical experience to the emergence of capitalism’, like Marxist and economic histories. A system that arguably upholds structural inequities encountered by women in any capitalist economy. Feminist historians such as Alice Clark argue that women’s useful economic roles, before the arrival of capitalism, gave them a certain level of equality with their husbands, since production was centered around the home women were engaged in running farms landed estates, and some trades. However, as capitalism developed throughout the 17th century, the labor divide between typical men and women increased, with the husband usually being employed in paid jobs outside of the home while the wife stayed home performing unpaid household labor. with the realm of paid labor being understood as privileged, inherently male, and more socially valuable than the feminized domesticity of the home. This in many ways emulated the Marxist notion of an inherently exploitive relationship between proletariat and bourgeoisie, one worked with little gain while the other held all available economic powers and freedom. Despite this making women’s and Gender history’s relatively structuralist approach similar to Marxist historical writing, ‘Scott added a new dimension to the meaning of gender by urging women’s historians to embrace post-structuralist theory as well.’ In this way Women’s and Gender History attempts to reject essentialism, stepping away from ‘the belief in an ahistorical, transcendent core of experience and identity’. …….push for more women’s history as a means of recognizing and valuing their work in the public sphere, in the hopes that conditions for women would improve. And this would in turn advance the feminist’s cause; a ‘collective quest’ for economic and political equality.

Conclusion

Overall, Marxist economic and political theory has influenced many types of newer historical writing in numerous ways, with perhaps the most obvious being the transition from a top-down approach focusing on the elite and wealthy to a bottom-up approach encompassing the history of all peoples regardless of wealth or status. and through stressing the importance of economic factors in history, paved the way for further new approaches historical writing.