The fate of Marxist historiography

[I]n response to complaints on the right that the crimes of right-leaning authoritarian regimes are somehow over-taught and left-leaning authoritarian regimes are under-taught [...] I should note that I took my Russian and Chinese history courses at the University of Massachusetts located in the beautiful People’s Republic of Amherst; a conservative campus or department it was not. And yet the ruthlessness of Lenin, the brutality of Stalin and the callousness of Mao were all well discussed; even ‘leftist’ professors these days do not generally feel the need to carry water for those regimes and in any case the historical record on the failure of those regimes is really clear. Never in a history department have I met a teacher who was not quite frank about the horrifying aspects of the regimes in question; I’m sure such historians must exist somewhere, but they must also be very rare birds indeed.

But back to ‘historical materialism.’ Now that’s a slippery phrasing which can mean two things. One the one hand, it can be an argument that the issue looks differently from a materialist lens of analysis – that is, if you considered the concrete material conditions (income, living standards, food security, nutrition, life expectancy, infrastructure, gross production, etc.) rather than cultural, intellectual or religious conditions, you might see something different. A claim of ‘what you see depends on where you look,’ which is a fair point to make assuming the initial analytical lens was not already a materialist one. On the other hand, because ‘historical materialism‘ is what Marxists – and not many others, because it is relatively rare (in my experience, at least) to hear historians use that phrasing – call doctrinaire Marxist historical theory, it can also mean, “if you adopted a historical school that presupposes my conclusions, you too would have to presuppose my conclusions.” Which is true in so far as it goes, which is not very far. But it can be hard in many cases to immediately tell the difference between these two statements.

In the latter case, while almost all historians use tools out of the toolbox that is Marxist historiography – we talked, for instance, about the Annales approach, which is one such tool; critical theory is another – very few historians adopt a doctrinaire Marxist interpretation of history anymore. The reason ought to be fairly obvious: Marxist ‘historical materialism’ asserted a series of stages of economic development which, because neither Marx nor Engels were particularly gifted historians and were working with very incomplete information about the economy of the past to boot, turn out to map very poorly to both the way that economic systems developed before the 1800s and to how they came to develop after the 1800s, which is a problem for a historical theory which argues that most important historical developments are predicated on economic systems. Consequently, portions of Marxist historiography have been largely abandoned (in most cases for many decades) because it became clear that the actual historical record could not support them, while other portions have become standard tools used widely by historians with non-Marxist viewpoints. In a sense, historians have looted Marxist historical theory, plucking from it the still use concepts but leaving much of the less useful dogmatism behind. Those useful concepts, in turn, are so pervasive that I must imagine no historian could get a PhD without being made to learn them and demonstrate that they can understand and deploy them.

– Bret Devereaux