How did Marxist historiography die?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I know enough about historiography to know that back in the day Marxist theory was dominant to the extent even non-marxist historians were operating under the shadow of its dialectic. I also know that in contemporary times, Marxism as a historical school is defunct and any extant forms are heavily revised. My question is, what happened? Was it a few blows that overturned its dogma, or was there death by a thousand cuts as people gradually chipped away at its core assumptions?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This is a complicated subject and I'll write out a proper post fairly soon, but, yes, it was pretty rapid.

[Georg Ebner]

Funnily enough MARXism suffered in the XXth the same fate as HEGELism in the XIXth: When the ideoLogy died, it began to enrichen historioGraphy.

[Republican Party Stalwart]

I imagine that the dissolution of the Soviet Union certainly contributed to that process.

[Blue3]

I don’t think it died… many of its ideas rippled out to other models and influenced their core assumptions, in a way that maybe were no longer directly called “Marxist” but were clearly influenced by it. For example, there’s no clear successor of Genghis Khan today, but literally all of history has been shaped by him and his descendants — even if his direct and clear line of heirs is gone, his genes are still everywhere.

[Georg Ebner]

Funnily enough MARXism suffered in the XXth the same fate as HEGELism in the XIXth: When the ideoLogy died, it began to enrichen historioGraphy.

"Funnily enough" because of MARX' "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

[Agonized-Statism]

The trend in the field since the mid-century has been toward more comprehensive and interdisciplinary histories that consider a variety of perspectives, Marxist included.

Speaking for the US perspective at least, progressive historians who embraced an economic determinist interpretation of American history dominated the field in the early 20th century, but they were no Marxists. Consensus history dominated the field in the 1950s and '60s, when it was decided that Charles Beard pointing out that wealthy Northeast industrialists and Southern planters could be at odds was apparently Russki subversion. No one school has dominated American historiography since the New Left historians of the 1960s blew people's minds by emphasizing power imbalances of all sorts and there was a significant intrusion from another field when mid-century advancements in computing power allowed for sophisticated modeling toward the application of mathematical methods to history (cliometrics; this was the birth of counterfactual analysis).

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

As an Italian, I can't help but feeling that this question is parallel to asking "how did we go from the PCI polling over a quarter of the vote for decades to officially Marxist or Communist parties being all but dead?". The answer to that is of course complicated with lots of moving parts but most of all cannot elude a certain series of events that happened between 9 November 1989 and 26 December 1991. Of course, in this country the story of the demise of Marxist historiography intersects with one about political legitimacy and the historical memory of fascism and antifascism (cf. Renzo De Felice), which would be an extremely interesting subtopic itself but is also one whose lingering effects I find rather tedious.

[Samof94]

I don’t think it died… many of its ideas rippled out to other models and influenced their core assumptions, in a way that maybe were no longer directly called “Marxist” but were clearly influenced by it. For example, there’s no clear successor of Genghis Khan today, but literally all of history has been shaped by him and his descendants — even if his direct and clear line of heirs is gone, his genes are still everywhere.

A bit off topic, but a lot of his descendants converted to Islam for some reason.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Funnily enough MARXism suffered in the XXth the same fate as HEGELism in the XIXth: When the ideoLogy died, it began to enrichen historioGraphy.

The interesting thing is that there was a substantial lag between the effective death of Marxism as viable explanatory system of thought and the point at which that truth became obvious,* and was in that period that academic Marxist became, briefly, dominant in the humanities and social sciences. Which explains why the slide, when it came, was so rapid: it isn't as if most of the Marxist historians of the 1970s actually believed in Marxism in a deep or meaningful sense, and were able to abandon it without difficulty in the 1980s.

_{*Kołakowski made the point that Marxism was no longer capable of actually explaining anything and that many self-styled Marxists were now attached to positions and causes completely alien to anything that Marxism had previously been associated with in 1976 (though as Main Currents is a massive work he would have formulated the argument itself much earlier), while also noting the methodological contributions that Marxism had made to the study of history would survive. Hobsbawm made a similar argument (though would have denied this!) at a lecture in 1978. The former would be when nerves set in, and the latter when the penny dropped.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Speaking for the US perspective at least...

Ah, but you see, the United States (and North America more broadly) was/is basically marginal internationally, and so has always followed its own insular track.

[RINO Tom]

I'm definitely the least knowledgeable about this in the thread, but isn't a basic tenant of Marxist historiography a somewhat linear view of "progress" in some sense?  I would argue that basic tenant has made its way into modern left wing thought, as many progressives think of history as a march toward more social progress ... there's no other framework where comparing those who fought for the abolition of human slavery and those who fought for gay marriage rights are under some unified ideological umbrella simply because both were "progress."

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

I'm definitely the least knowledgeable about this in the thread, but isn't a basic tenant of Marxist historiography a somewhat linear view of "progress" in some sense?  I would argue that basic tenant has made its way into modern left wing thought, as many progressives think of history as a march toward more social progress ... there's no other framework where comparing those who fought for the abolition of human slavery and those who fought for gay marriage rights are under some unified ideological umbrella simply because both were "progress."

I'm sorry but this post comes off as an attempt to forcibly insert a pet peeve of yours into an unrelated discussion. How random "progressives" think about historical social movements that they consider to be good seems irrelevant to the question of Marxist frameworks being adopted, used and abandoned by academic historians (and in any case the concept of history as a linear march of progress definitely predates Marx - you may be familiar with the term "Whig history").

Also, this is my pet peeve but the correct term is "tenet". Ideologies are not landlords.

[KaiserDave]

I'm definitely the least knowledgeable about this in the thread, but isn't a basic tenant of Marxist historiography a somewhat linear view of "progress" in some sense?  I would argue that basic tenant has made its way into modern left wing thought, as many progressives think of history as a march toward more social progress ... there's no other framework where comparing those who fought for the abolition of human slavery and those who fought for gay marriage rights are under some unified ideological umbrella simply because both were "progress."

[RINO Tom]

I'm definitely the least knowledgeable about this in the thread, but isn't a basic tenant of Marxist historiography a somewhat linear view of "progress" in some sense?  I would argue that basic tenant has made its way into modern left wing thought, as many progressives think of history as a march toward more social progress ... there's no other framework where comparing those who fought for the abolition of human slavery and those who fought for gay marriage rights are under some unified ideological umbrella simply because both were "progress."

I'm sorry but this post comes off as an attempt to forcibly insert a pet peeve of yours into an unrelated discussion. How random "progressives" think about historical social movements that they consider to be good seems irrelevant to the question of Marxist frameworks being adopted, used and abandoned by academic historians (and in any case the concept of history as a linear march of progress definitely predates Marx - you may be familiar with the term "Whig history").

Also, this is my pet peeve but the correct term is "tenet". Ideologies are not landlords.

Lol, thank you for the catch - it had been a long Friday by this point!  And I didn’t mean it the way you interpreted it.  It was more of a piggyback comment on an earlier post that said this Marxist view of history didn’t necessarily die so much as it dispersed.

[Georg Ebner]

I'm definitely the least knowledgeable about this in the thread, but isn't a basic tenant of Marxist historiography a somewhat linear view of "progress" in some sense?  I would argue that basic tenant has made its way into modern left wing thought, as many progressives think of history as a march toward more social progress ... there's no other framework where comparing those who fought for the abolition of human slavery and those who fought for gay marriage rights are under some unified ideological umbrella simply because both were "progress."

The other way round: Already the "Enlightenment" in the XVIIIth had been progressistic (and as a result been not just a-, but anti-historic). LESSING, HEGEL & MARX "only" radicalized this by creating pseudohistorical systems raping real Historia.
Even during the XIXth - after all the century of Historism! - the vast majority of "historians" (a la MOMMSEN, v.DROYSEN, v.SYBEL, v.TREITSCHKE; Whigs aso.) were hindered by their progressism to be more than "positivistical priests", i.e. useful dataCollectors - because they saw the past only as a preLude to their present era, saw it through the lens of the present day (Greeks:Persians=Prussians:Austrians aso.). And in the XXth "Under the wind of contemporary progressivism the historian vanished into thin air and history is again left to the hands of the simple scholar. Modern scholarship - more refined than that of the baroque Foliants, but distorted by hermeneutic categories, that are equally anachronistic - archives history, this subtle and fragile invention of some 19th century reactionaries." (GOMEZ DAVILA)

[Aurelius2]

I'm definitely the least knowledgeable about this in the thread, but isn't a basic tenant of Marxist historiography a somewhat linear view of "progress" in some sense?  I would argue that basic tenant has made its way into modern left wing thought, as many progressives think of history as a march toward more social progress ... there's no other framework where comparing those who fought for the abolition of human slavery and those who fought for gay marriage rights are under some unified ideological umbrella simply because both were "progress."

I'm sorry but this post comes off as an attempt to forcibly insert a pet peeve of yours into an unrelated discussion. How random "progressives" think about historical social movements that they consider to be good seems irrelevant to the question of Marxist frameworks being adopted, used and abandoned by academic historians (and in any case the concept of history as a linear march of progress definitely predates Marx - you may be familiar with the term "Whig history").

Also, this is my pet peeve but the correct term is "tenet". Ideologies are not landlords.

Lol, thank you for the catch - it had been a long Friday by this point!  And I didn’t mean it the way you interpreted it.  It was more of a piggyback comment on an earlier post that said this Marxist view of history didn’t necessarily die so much as it dispersed.

Nah, Whig history was around before Marx (dis)graced this Earth with his presence, and *long* before Marxist analysis dispersed away from class struggle with things like the Frankfurt School and the New Left.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Georg is right: the teleological aspect to Marxist historiography mostly reflected the wider intellectual environment that Marx was a part of, rather than being an innovation of Marxist historiography itself. Treitschke is an especially good example as while part of the broader liberal tradition, he genuinely was slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun (i.e. as an extreme German Nationalist rather than as a conservative). The big influence of Marxism on the rest of the trade was concerned the interest in material factors, which even certain strongly anti-Marxist historical schools (e.g. the Annales School) were heavily influenced by. But you can't call any historian who pays attention to material factors a Marxist, as Marxism was a total system of thought, explicitly linked (at least in theory: in practice a lot of Marxist historians simply declared their work to be political activism) to political activism.

[ingemann]

I know enough about historiography to know that back in the day Marxist theory was dominant to the extent even non-marxist historians were operating under the shadow of its dialectic. I also know that in contemporary times, Marxism as a historical school is defunct and any extant forms are heavily revised. My question is, what happened? Was it a few blows that overturned its dogma, or was there death by a thousand cuts as people gradually chipped away at its core assumptions?

While I’m not an expect on Marxist history, I think it suffered under history becoming less focused on Europe and European descended countries, and instead became more global. While Marxist perspective is not correct in a European context, European history can to some extent be put in the correct boxes, but when you look outside Europe you see a world which doesn’t fit into those boxes and where you have to torture their history to make them fit.

So globalism killed it.

[Georg Ebner]

Georg is right: the teleological aspect to Marxist historiography mostly reflected the wider intellectual environment that Marx was a part of, rather than being an innovation of Marxist historiography itself. Treitschke is an especially good example as while part of the broader liberal tradition, he genuinely was slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun (i.e. as an extreme German Nationalist rather than as a conservative). The big influence of Marxism on the rest of the trade was concerned the interest in material factors, which even certain strongly anti-Marxist historical schools (e.g. the Annales School) were heavily influenced by. But you can't call any historian who pays attention to material factors a Marxist, as Marxism was a total system of thought, explicitly linked (at least in theory: in practice a lot of Marxist historians simply declared their work to be political activism) to political activism.

Right. But even here the fruits have come only indirectly and not as numerously as assumed: The problem is, that MARX was realiter a bourgeois lawyer - and the final reason is, that He didn't love the factoryWorkers, He only wanted to exploit them (to ENGELS: "What are they worth, if they cannot fight for us!") for His fight against the old order, finally against His overFather in heaven. Thus He saw only the legal aspects of wages, workingTime, profit aso.; just like He decried the "Natural Law" as bourgeois inVention - and tacitly appealed to it; ridiculed Idealism - and was Himself an "idealist". If he had empathized with the factoryWorkers, He would have gone terre-à-terre and had detected, that their condition was far worse and wouldn't fundamentally change with new ownership (as demonstrated by the SovietUnion): Because the new economy was centred around - the factory: "The private capitalism of the West and the public capitalism of the East are quarrelling, whether the factory should be private or public - but what does that alter, as long as it can continue to produce destroyed souls!" (GOMEZ DAVILA)
So j'accuse the MARXistoid historians to have been left "intellectuals" - also with an "OedipusComplex" -  detached from economical reality by having been inprofoundly materialistic (additionally, it would be the task of our time for the few capable scientists left to find the biological basis behind/below the sociological one) and can only expand on them, what G.RITTER wrote on the Annales: "They appear as ungifted pupils - without knowing him properly - of Taine"...

[Senator Incitatus]

Georg, thank you as always.

[PSOL]

Lawyer Marx the idealist believer in natural law who so promoted getting people to the factories as the be all and end all.

Some of you people need to get your facts from the source instead of engaging in third hand circlejerks