No bourgeois revolution in Britain

[Tim Cornelis]

There appears to have been no bourgeois revolution in Great Britain. If true, it would seem quite devastating to Marxism. Can anyone help with this?

[Kill all the fetuses!]

Why would it be devastating? Technically speaking, Russia didn't have its bourgeois revolution in the same sense of the word as other countries did. It's not that every country has to go through the same phases in history. Unless, of course, you are picking as unique case due to its industrial revolution or whatnot.

Anyhow, someone with more knowledge can give a better answer, but weren't English civil wars, with the parliamentarians against the kind and the subsequent (a non-linear) establishment of the parliamentary monarchy a bourgeois revolution, where Liberals ultimately took power of the country?

[Rudolf]

You could start with the English Civil War. Iirc the historian Christopher Hill went with the notion of the civil war in the 17th century as being a bourgeois revolution. It does pose a problem though in that there wasn't really that much of a shift in social relations as a result of the civil war as was seen in bourgeois revolutions on the continent although we can consider it a fundamental part of the emergence of capitalism in Britain.

[Creative Destruction]

There appears to have been no bourgeois revolution in Great Britain. If true, it would seem quite devastating to Marxism. Can anyone help with this?

Did you read that Jacobin article questioning the validity of bourgeois revolutions?

I'm not sure why it would be devastating to Marxism. Regardless of whether Marx got this bit wrong or not, I am not sure if that says anything of the need for a proletarian revolution. When you strip away things like the "historical tasks" of the proletariat, based on the assumption of bourgeois revolutions, and clinging to the idea that necessarily a revolution against capitalism is a proletarian or socialist revolution, you're still left with the core analysis of capitalism, exploitation and what not. If anything, it would strengthen the part in which Marx said that history is made by people. It just means that instead of treating it as a natural flow of things, that it instead has to be a completely conscious decision on the part of the proletariat to overthrow capitalism if they want emancipation. I find that thought a bit more freeing and powerful, actually, than being at the mercy of historical processes (which I always thought was a bit metaphysical of Marx.)

[Rafiq]

You could start with the English Civil War. Iirc the historian Christopher Hill went with the notion of the civil war in the 17th century as being a bourgeois revolution. It does pose a problem though in that there wasn't really that much of a shift in social relations as a result of the civil war as was seen in bourgeois revolutions on the continent although we can consider it a fundamental part of the emergence of capitalism in Britain.

No bourgeois revolution led to social revolution. Capitalist social revolution occurred organically from feudalism, and was not politically dependent. What they did was conform the state to the interests of capital, and weaken or destroy the parasitic aristocracy whose power was solely political.

[Ceallach_the_Witch]

what about 1688?

[Creative Destruction]

I don't know for sure if this is what inspired Tim to start the thread, but the recent rankor over whether there was a bourgeois revolution or not seems to come from this article in Jacobin:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/capitalisms-gravediggers/

It's a pretty good and convincing article, I thought.

[Tim Cornelis]

The English Civil War was generally considered to be a bourgeois revolution from the 1940s onward. This has been rejected based on new evidence.

Rednoise your comment is already abandoning Marxism as you consider idealist factors just as important (if not more important). It shows that indeed it would be devastating to Marxism. It's devastating because it doesn't line up with what the Marxist method says social development to be.

[Rafiq]

To be clear, some historians have tried to contest that the English civil war was a class war by pointing out that a significant portion of the bourgeoisie sided with the royalists, and some gentry with parliament. What is class struggle now, some mental abstraction which people are conscious of? By the 17th century the bourgeoisie had already became a prominent class, if not a hegemonic one. The whole point of absolutism was to reconcile their interests with the old feudal order: Why wouldn't a good number side with the crown and the old order? Surely we refer to tendencies and not laws of history. Furthermore, most of the bourgeoisie sided with parliament. But even if they didn't, this would not change the bourgeois character of this faction: as their triumph would result and make possible the full consolidation of British society by capitalist relations. We can actually measure this, too.

What of the gentry, then? What is infuriating about the scum historians who thought they were dealing a massive blow to Marxism is that it was MARX a hundred years earlier who pointed out that through the 16th century the gentry was largely transforming into the bourgeoisie as far as ther relations to production went. The point is that society was changing and people either sided with the old order or a new one. Even some landed gentry may have thought that parliaments triumph would mean more social stability and so on.

[Rafiq]

Contrast this to France where the aristocracy was not transforming and took on a parasitic political character at the expense of bourgeois society.

[Tim Cornelis]

I don't find that terribly convincing. Some switching of allegiances happens in any revolution, but apparently there weren't any substantial political reforms that opened up the way for bourgeois law and capitalist economic development at the expense of medieval feudal privilege.

[Creative Destruction]

The English Civil War was generally considered to be a bourgeois revolution from the 1940s onward. This has been rejected based on new evidence.

Rednoise your comment is already abandoning Marxism as you consider idealist factors just as important (if not more important). It shows that indeed it would be devastating to Marxism. It's devastating because it doesn't line up with what the Marxist method says social development to be.

I basically agree with the concluding section of that article, "The Folly of Inevitability." Socialism can still arise out of a clash based on the antagonisms of the productive forces, but instead of it being an inevitable result of that clash, it has to be a conscious decision, we now see. I am not sure that is "idealist," actually. It seems to be more idealist to just assume that some guiding hand of history would push the proletariat in that direction, rather than it being a solely man-made progression.

Were it true that these clashes automatically resulted in socialism, then we should have had socialism by now. Instead, when it has happened in the last century, what we typically end up with is some sort of reformed version of capitalism. You got that with the Soviet Union, you got that through the numerous uprisings in the 1900s and we see this most recently with the seizure of power by SYRIZA and the anticipated seizure of power by PODEMOS.

If this is truly a blow to Marxism, then I suppose we need to start talking about this in post-Marxist terms. I do not think this does that, though. Every other little bit of Marx's analysis of capitalism and what should be done to emancipate the working class still stands as relevant and, if anything, more powerfully. If we cling onto, desperately, the idea that a discredited historical theory is actually needed to see through a revolution, then it no longer becomes a scientific socialist project. I'd argue that doing one thing over and over based on the same set of ideals that are clearly wrong is more idealistic than anything else.

What's exciting about this discovery, though, is that it's possible to see now, concretely, where all the Marxist movements may have gone wrong. They were all sitting on their thumbs and preaching the inevitability of socialism to arise from these clashes, and when it never happened, they just continued to sit on their thumbs waiting. At least this now confirms that a mass movement of the proletariat has to be conscious actors in their own emancipation, rather than just being at the will of supposed historical forces or, where it regards Leninists, waiting for some great savior party to come along and bail out the proletariat.

[Rafiq]

I don't find that terribly convincing. Some switching of allegiances happens in any revolution, but apparently there weren't any substantial political reforms that opened up the way for bourgeois law and capitalist economic development at the expense of medieval feudal privilege.

Of course there were. With parliaments triumph (Despite the glorious revolution, hegemony still belonged to parliament with the new monarchy taking on an almost symbolic function), this paved the way for the English bill of rights and the eventual solidification of bourgeois civic values. This wasn't just inevitable or because of nice enlightenment ideas of governance. Without the victory of parliament during the war, the power to draft the bill of rights wouldn't exist. With parliament in power, political rule now coincided with the flexible demands of the bourgeoisie throughout its henceforth development - ultimately preventing capital accumulation from being hindered as it was in France where the carcass of feudalism was maintained by the retention of old feudal laws thereby leading to the rise of the aristocratic parasites with no affirmed social character.

[Rudolf]

I don't find that terribly convincing. Some switching of allegiances happens in any revolution, but apparently there weren't any substantial political reforms that opened up the way for bourgeois law and capitalist economic development at the expense of medieval feudal privilege.


I'm not entirely sure on the economic development argument tbh as on further investigation it appears that enclosures accelerated after the Civil War.

This acceleration could have occurred in part due to the abolition of the Star Court in 1641 by the parliamentarians which saw disputes over enclosures among other things as well as being a tool to suppress opposition to royal policies. The abolition of the star court being an early blow against the power of the crown just before the civil war kicked off may have helped precipitate it and would have helped capitalist economic development.

[nadya]

There are so many clandestine forces among public servants in Britain ready to pounce on them once a revolutionary situation will have been achieved. The Labour Party and the British socialist Party once dominated Parliament like how the Italian communist Party once dominated the Italian Parliament. We discuss the problem once we get there and I am sure we shall get there. People are starving nowadays. The rosy pictures in the newspapers and television does not portray the real volatile situation we have now.

[Subversive]

The English Civil War was generally considered to be a bourgeois revolution from the 1940s onward. This has been rejected based on new evidence.
Despite you being about 300 years off, do you mind presenting this "new evidence" so that people here actually have something to discuss and aren't just speculating on what they think you meant when you intentionally blanketed your claims?

[Creative Destruction]

Despite you being about 300 years off, do you mind presenting this "new evidence" so that people here actually have something to discuss and aren't just speculating on what they think you meant when you intentionally blanketed your claims?

He's not "300 years off." You misread what he was saying, as you tend to do.

I posted a link to the article that I suspect kicked off these questions for Tim, but he may have gotten it somewhere else.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/capitalisms-gravediggers/

One of the books recommended in the article, specifically about the English Civil War, is Merchants and Revolution.

[Rudolf]

He's not "300 years off." You misread what he was saying, as you tend to do.

I posted a link to the article that I suspect kicked off these questions for Tim, but he may have gotten it somewhere else.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/capitalisms-gravediggers/

One of the books recommended in the article, specifically about the English Civil War, is Merchants and Revolution.


Some of that article's funny like the following: "Capitalists pay workers in advance and must realize their gains by selling what workers produce."

It's like they've never worked. The worker hands over their commodity well before the capitalist pays for it. Standard procedure in the UK atm is up to 1 month.

[Creative Destruction]

Some of that article's funny like the following: "Capitalists pay workers in advance and must realize their gains by selling what workers produce."

It's like they've never worked. The worker hands over their commodity well before the capitalist pays for it. Standard procedure in the UK atm is up to 1 month.

Yeah, his definition of capitalism is a bit off, but I don't think it really has much bearing on the later thesis about bourgeois revolutions.

[Hit The North]

He's not "300 years off." You misread what he was saying, as you tend to do.


If Tim thinks the English civil war happened in the 1940s then he is 300 years off. Although I suspect it was a typo ;).

[Rafiq]

Despite you being about 300 years off, do you mind presenting this "new evidence" so that people here actually have something to discuss and aren't just speculating on what they think you meant when you intentionally blanketed your claims?

There was no such "new evidence". During the late 1970's and onward to the 21st century, an ideological wave of reaction which both represented the re-armament of capital's reproduction ideologically as well as the forces of its degeneration swept across the planet and in the process of doing so, rendered null Marxism's dominance in academia in many fields. This had nothing to do with evidence, but the obfuscation and designation of Marxism as something it had never been. As mentioned, Marx himself already recognized the class relations of the gentry to have taken a capitalist character more than one hundred years earlier than this "new evidence", which amounted to nothing more than mention of the demographic realities, thereby rendering void the notion that empirically superior means of articulating history arose. This simply isn't the case, what occurred was a massive ideological displacement of our coordinates of reason.

There is no proportion between the sophistication (how convincing it was, its profoundness) of this assault on Marxism, and its intensity. What was already pre-conceived, soon after the crises of the 1970's, was that Marxism had to be uprooted from academia. This is coupled with the only point of counter-offense being a very formalized, hollow Marxism which prevailed during the time. Much of the responses, for example, amount to nothing more than pathetic ass-coverings and apologia on part of Marxists - because it became a matter of apologizing for their sympathies to Marxism, rather than defending our historic method from the hordes of darkness and reaction.

[Tim Cornelis]

By in the 1940s I meant it was considered a bourgeois revolution in academic debate from then onwards until the 1970s.

This article kicked it off:

http://www.historytoday.com/conrad-russell/bourgeois-revolution-mirage

This book:

http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1420

And this review:

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=869

Are a powerful reply (indirectly), but I need to read a little bit more.

[Jolly Red Giant]

By in the 1940s I meant it was considered a bourgeois revolution in academic debate from then onwards until the 1970s.

This article kicked it off:

http://www.historytoday.com/conrad-russell/bourgeois-revolution-mirage

This book:

http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1420

And this review:

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=869

Are a powerful reply (indirectly), but I need to read a little bit more.

There has been much academic debate on the topic of bourgeois revolutions in Britain - much of it related to conflict between bourgeois and Stalinist historians who populated academia in e 1970s and 1980s.

The Stalinist approach was exceptionally rigid and attempted to pigeon hole varoius revolutionary movements into a very structured (and stagist) commentary.

The key element of any revolutionary change is the development of new forms of econmic relationships that overthrow the existing norm. That can occur in a violent heaval or over a more prolonged period that can be punctuated with periods of violent upheaval.

In terms of the links you give - Russell was a bourgeois academic historian who spawned further research into the topic of the bourgeois revolution in Britain. his main focus was to argue that the transition from feudalism to capitalism was natural, progressive and leading to the highest point of political and social development (i.e. Capitalism) - and that it occur in spite of events like the English Civil War rather than because of them. Russell's approach was followed up by a number of other historians (like Adamson) but mch of his research has now been discredited and those who have followed his approach have fallen into a quagmire of confusion as they have attempted to fit many square pegs into round holes.

Davidson is a different kettle of fish and has posed some very interesting and detailed arguments in relation to the nature of bourgeois revolutions. Davidson's approach is much more in keeping with the arguments put forward by Marx and Engels and don't fall into the rigid and stagist approach of the old Stalinist academics.

The process could be summarised as follows (with the caveat that it is far more complex than what I am outlining) - the English Civil War was, in effect, the start of a process of changing economic relations - it occurred before the economic and social conditions had developed sufficiently to successfully over throw feudal property relations. The Glorious Revolution was a further step on that path - however, the conflict was not played out in Britain but in Ireland with the Williamite Wars which involved Dutch, British, French and Irish forces organised around William of Orange and James II. The forces that supported the Williamite elements were primarily the merchant classes that were to go on to develop imperialist conglomerates like the East India Company (and yes I know the East India Company pre-dated this period - but it's major expansion occurred in the 18th century).

So it could be argued that there was not one bourgeois revolution in Britain - but a process of changing social and econmic relations that occurred over a prolonged period (i.e. nearly a century) and that were punctuated by periods of intense violent conflict between many competing social classes.

[Rafiq]

http://www.historytoday.com/conrad-russell/bourgeois-revolution-mirage


It's important to bear in mind that a pre-conceived notion of what Marxists understand as class is completely over-rided and botched by Russel. When he makes incredibly bold statements like "there was no demographic correlation between allegiance and class" and so on, this stems from an almost ridiculous notion of class.

One thing to point out is that under the qualifications for class warfare as being employed by these historians, class struggle has never existed at all and historical materialism was completely wrong even to the gaze of Marx and Engels (Who were certainly around during the time wherein working class people voted conservative, which apparently is a flaw in the notion of "class solidarity" (?) ). I mean, how could we not account for this? How would we even be able to approach things like the demographic composition of Fascism, and so on? It is a straw man to begin with, so pathetic to the point where not only does Russel fail in rebuking Christopher Hill, but that if Marx was alive (and I'm not talking about a Marx who was alive to see the developments in historiography during the 20th century, LITERALLY the Marx of the 19th century) he himself would have torn philistines like Russel a new asshole. Because we ought to be critical, let's not completely dismiss Russel because of his almost embarrassing talk of "Hegelianism" (Yes Russel, Hegelianism simply means two opposing forces fighting, that's dialectics! Like what am I reading? Is this real? As though he's actually dissecting the foundations of Marxism and finally 'Hegelianism', which apparently means opposites fighting and history progressing. Ideas which obviously never preceded Hegel), let's recognize that he is utterly wrong - the English Civil war was indeed a bourgeois revolution insofar as it historically, not only retrospectively, signified the subordination of the English state to the bourgeoisie.

The whole dichotomy is false anyway: The very minute Marxism becomes a formalized mold which has to be either empirically verified or falsified is the minute wherein Marxism becomes an abstraction to which reality is conformed, a meta-ideology. The theoretical mechanisms which validate truths, scientific in nature, must be present within the foundations of Marxism.

[Subversive]

By in the 1940s I meant it was considered a bourgeois revolution in academic debate from then onwards until the 1970s.
I figured that's what you meant: I was mostly teasing.
'Academic debate' and 'Academia' in general means absolutely nothing to me, so I was jokingly pointing out that you were '300 years off' from the Revolution. (Edit: Yes, I do have an odd sense of humor.) The alternative was to point out you were still about 100 years off from Marxism, when people actually did begin to consider the English Revolution as a 'bourgeois revolution'.

So why do we wait for the 1940's to make this classification? Just because that's when the world of 'Academia' finally took notice? I have always found such concepts silly.

And furthermore, if we take any of this seriously we find only that those in the '1970's' and onward are only ignorant of things they choose to speak about, and that this is not really "academic" at all - it is just, what I would call, 'fraud'. I have a great issue with 'modern academics' for ver much nearly the same reasons, but that is a wholly different subject I won't get into.

I think Rafiq summed up all the points as to why this entire discussion is rather silly and that those people from the 1970s and on, should be considered nothing but the charlatans that they are/were.

Though, I also never understood why it was stated this would have an impact on Marxism, though. What difference does it make what the English did or did not do? They are but a minor point in the greater scale of things.

[Rafiq]

Also this may be useful: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/carlin/1980/xx/civilwar.html

[Ismail]

FWIW you can find a Soviet revisionist perspective on the English Revolution (and various other bourgeois revolutions in the ensuing two decades) here: https://archive.org/details/ModernHistory16401870

It's not incredibly deep or anything (considering it's a translation of a textbook for Soviet students) but yeah.


The Stalinist approach was exceptionally rigid and attempted to pigeon hole varoius revolutionary movements into a very structured (and stagist) commentary.Well considering that both Christopher Hill and especially Eric Hobsbawm were revisionists (the latter extolled Eurocommunism and even criticized Allende for his supposed "sectarianism" rather than the actual reason his regime fell) it's a bit silly to call their analyses "rigid" (or "Stalinist" for that matter.)

As far as "stageism" goes, Lenin pointed out (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jul/11.htm), "This fundamental fact—the transition of society from primitive forms of slavery to serfdom and finally to capitalism—you must always bear in mind, for only by remembering this fundamental fact, only by examining all political doctrines placed in this fundamental scheme, will you be able properly to appraise these doctrines and understand what they refer to; for each of these great periods in the history of mankind, slave-owning, feudal and capitalist, embraces scores and hundreds of centuries and presents such a mass of political forms, such a variety of political doctrines, opinions and revolutions, that this extreme diversity and immense variety (especially in connection with the political, philosophical and other doctrines of bourgeois scholars and politicians) can be understood only by firmly holding, as to a guiding thread, to this division of society into classes, this change in the forms of class rule, and from this standpoint examining all social questions—economic, political, spiritual, religious, etc."

[Alexios]

There was no such "new evidence". During the late 1970's and onward to the 21st century, an ideological wave of reaction which both represented the re-armament of capital's reproduction ideologically as well as the forces of its degeneration swept across the planet and in the process of doing so, rendered null Marxism's dominance in academia in many fields. This had nothing to do with evidence, but the obfuscation and designation of Marxism as something it had never been.

As mentioned, Marx himself already recognized the class relations of the gentry to have taken a capitalist character more than one hundred years earlier than this "new evidence", which amounted to nothing more than mention of the demographic realities, thereby rendering void the notion that empirically superior means of articulating history arose. This simply isn't the case, what occurred was a massive ideological displacement of our coordinates of reason.

There is no proportion between the sophistication (how convincing it was, its profoundness) of this assault on Marxism, and its intensity. What was already pre-conceived, soon after the crises of the 1970's, was that Marxism had to be uprooted from academia. This is coupled with the only point of counter-offense being a very formalized, hollow Marxism which prevailed during the time.

This is completely delusional. There was no "ideological wave" with the Cold War that made Western historiography suddenly disregard Marxist stagism. It had never been taken seriously by anyone because it is a poor method of historical analysis. Even historians in the Soviet Bloc who were required by law to adhere to Marxist dogma left their icons at the door when they conducted research. Many of these people, like George Ostrogorsky, made very important contributions recognized by Westerners and used up to the present as a standard of historiography. And to act as if there has been no new evidence on the English Civil War, or on any historical event, is absolutely insane and makes you look like a conspiracy nut on the level of Alex Jones.

Marxism itself perhaps has made inadvertent contributions to historiography, with social and economic history becoming more popular, but the stagist view of history as espoused by Marxists has never and will never be respected as a sound method of analyzing human societies. Even characterizing the English Civil War as a "bourgeois revolution" presumes knowledge of the subject and reduces your ability to analyze the event from a critical standpoint. If someone calls you out on it, it isn't because they have a deep-seeded hatred for Marxism, but because they value sane critical thinking.



Much of the responses, for example, amount to nothing more than pathetic ass-coverings and apologia on part of Marxists - because it became a matter of apologizing for their sympathies to Marxism, rather than defending our historic method from the hordes of darkness and reaction.

Those of us willing to risk damaging our harmony with the Divine Word can go places; you'll continue to look like a fool for as long as you pretend that things written a century and a half ago cannot be flawed in any way.

[Rurkel]

Even historians in the Soviet Bloc who were required by law to adhere to Marxist dogma left their icons at the door when they conducted research. Many of these people, like George Ostrogorsky, made very important contributions recognized by Westerners and used up to the present as a standard of historiography.

Ostrogorsky (the byzantinist, you mean him, right?) was a first-wave emigre. You're probably thinking of Soviet byzantinist Kazhdan, who emigrated quite late in life.

[Ismail]

Even historians in the Soviet Bloc who were required by law to adhere to Marxist dogma left their icons at the door when they conducted research. Many of these people, like George Ostrogorsky, made very important contributions recognized by Westerners and used up to the present as a standard of historiography.Besides the whole Ostrogorsky thing (as Rurkel noted he wasn't a Soviet historian, he emigrated before he could conceivably become one), what you're describing is the ascendancy of bourgeois ideology in the USSR, a component part of the rise of revisionism.

There is no shortage of ex-Soviet bourgeois historians who bemoan how "restrictive" the Stalin era was and how supposedly "dogmatic controls" on historiography were lessened after his death. To give one example: "In the 1950s and 1960s, after the death of Stalin, conditions for researching and writing American history began improving... Yazkov [one of the foremost Soviet revisionist historians on American history] believes that the American history written during the 1960s through the 1980s, the kind of historical scholarship, in other words, represented in this volume, is vastly different from the earlier work done in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s: it is based on a wider body of sources, less ideologically strict, and less flatly condemning of the United States. Yet, Yazkov admits, much of this more recent scholarship still retains strong traces of the original rigidity of Marxism, as readers of this volume may discover." (Gordon S. Wood, Russian-American Dialogue on the American Revolution, 1995, p. 7.)

This extended to all sorts of fields and had a definite purpose. Thus Simón Bolívar was judged to have been treated in a "one-sided" manner by Marx because the Soviet revisionists wanted to ally with bourgeois nationalists in Latin America and paint them in red colors. José Martí of Cuba, Gandhi and Nehru, Nasser, and other bourgeois nationalists had earlier "Stalinist" assessments totally revoked and less "dogmatic" analyses made of their work. This had nothing to do with enriching Marxism on the basis of science and everything to do with upholding bourgeois ideology while using Marxist phraseology.

Even seemingly remote subjects like the the Sepoy Revolt were ransacked by the revisionists to give credence to their claims that military regimes could lay the foundations for socialism in alliance with the "world socialist community" (aka Soviet social-imperialism.) Thus it shouldn't come as any surprise that under the cover of "overcoming dogma," and of "overcoming Stalinism" Soviet revisionist historians were using the "correct" verbiage in the service of bourgeois conclusions and awaiting the day they could dispense with any pretense of Marxism altogether.


This is completely delusional. There was no "ideological wave" with the Cold War that made Western historiography suddenly disregard Marxist stagism. It had never been taken seriously by anyone because it is a poor method of historical analysis.Also this is just wrong. There were a great many bourgeois ideologists (from historians like Charles Beard to economists like Joan Robinson) who were compelled to reckon with Marxism in some way, even if they obviously rejected it, simply because of the power of working-class movements in various countries. Eventually they had comprehensive attacks made on their writings precisely because they sounded too much like Marxism even if they obviously weren't in the view of actual Marxists.

[Rafiq]

This is completely delusional. There was no "ideological wave" with the Cold War that made Western historiography suddenly disregard Marxist stagism. It had never been taken seriously by anyone because it is a poor method of historical analysis. Even historians in the Soviet Bloc who were required by law to adhere to Marxist dogma left their icons at the door when they conducted research. Many of these people, like George Ostrogorsky, made very important contributions recognized by Westerners and used up to the present as a standard of historiography. And to act as if there has been no new evidence on the English Civil War, or on any historical event, is absolutely insane and makes you look like a conspiracy nut on the level of Alex Jones.

During, but not unique to the late 20th century, much of those disreputable and cowardly leftists attempted to deflect what could only be articulated as an ideological defeat by countering attacks on Marxism through dissociation through abstraction of the essence. Whether through constructing an original sin to which they disassociate, or outright engaging in complete revisionism (Lenin's sense of the word) in accordance with their ineptivity in re-inventing Marxism in accordance with new times, or more precisely, defending the historic method from the forces of ideological reaction. It is cowardly and utterly dishonest, Alexios, for you to prattle of "stageism", as though the assaults were not leveled at historical materialism by re-construcitng what historical materialism actually entailed, but a natural and innocent response to what could be perceived as "stageism". Marxist historiography was never characterized by so-called "stageism", even if this idea was implicitly there - the problem largely being (largely a straw man, at that) that history is linear through which there are different perceivable stages.

The real quarrel both you and the hordes of reaction had, was with the notion of class struggle characterizing history, and the totality of historic epochs. In order to legitimize the new neoliberal order, history had to be perceived as a process whereby capitalism became perfected, where we have reached the pinnacle of development through the perfection of civil society and the economy, that class struggle was a hindrance, and not a driving force of such developments. For all the hypocritical accusations of metaphysics or unfalsifiability, the cowardly bourgeois ideologues implicitly have a metaphysical substrate as far as their understanding of history went (i.e. Everything happened because it was struggling to realize the now). The fact of the matter is that you either have to be completely dishonest, or completely ignorant to deny the fact that there was an ideological assault on Marxism during the latter stages of the cold war, not just in the domain of historiography but in all other academic domains. Do you want to deny this now? Was it all a coincidence, or was it justified by the "honest" discoveries and the emergence of "evidence"? Was Marxist economics now all of a sudden rendered void as a result of a new, more substantive understanding of capitalism? I cannot even fathom how it could be denied: Marxist historiography was completely discarded because it had to be, and the justifications for it varied - which is precisely how we know it was an ideological assault. From all corners Marxism came under assault, from a sudden realization of the validity of Popper's criticism, to postmodern orientalist drivel which posed that "Historical materialism only applies to the development of Europe for the past thousand years" and so on.

The very contradictory, inconsistent and varied nature of these assaults, which in your mind occurred coincidentally at the exact same time period, demonstrates that the disregard for Marxism in academia had nothing to do with "new evidence" but a necessity to consolidate academia by capital. No one claims that it was a conscious conspiracy - again, it is not surprising that someone who prattles of "stageism" has not an iota of an understanding of how history works for Marxists, as though everything that happens has to somehow be some kind of coordinated attack wherein all of the perpetrators are working together. That's not the point and that's not how ideology functions. The point is that conditions arose whereby Communist ideological language became bankrupt and faded away as a result of the blows to the working class, thereby displacing all of the previous Marxist theory which occurred in academia. That's the point: No new evidence arose which could pose a semblance of a challenge to even Christopher Hill's work. The only thing that changed was the displacement of Marxism where all of a sudden class struggle equated to consciously knowing you're engaging in class struggle. No one needed such "new evidence" to come to the conclusions that they did regarding Marxism, one could have made the same argument a hundred years earlier about the French revolution not having been carried out by big capitalists and so on (which Kautsky himself recognized) - this doesn't disqualify it as a bourgeois revolution. Even then, the "new evidence" was a recognition of the fact that much of the bourgeoisie sided with the King, and that there was no correlation between allegiance and class. But this relies on the presumption that all the gentry were of the same position, which is absolutely wrong. It also pre-supposes other nonsensical ideas - like how the glorious revolution somehow was a reversion, completely ignoring the English bill of rights. And there is evidence that the bourgeoisie that did side with the royalists were largely like the hegemonic bourgeoisie of London which benefited from absolutism, with the overwhelming majority of the bourgeoisie of small towns attempting to rise to prominence siding with parliament. This is all brushed off by the noble crusaders against "stageism" and dismissed as allegiance as a result of religion. Also completely ignoring the fact that all of the different religious denominations of English puritanism coincided completely with different class interests.

So again, where is this "new evidence' which somehow renders Marxist "stageism" obsolete? There is none! The point isn't that there couldn't have been new findings, the point is that none of these findings, or this new evidence somehow is a case for a serious re-examination of historical materialism, none of this "new evidence" challenges any of the Marxist historiography regarding the English Civil War. As though "Marxist dogma" is somehow going to yield better results or worse like a utilitarian tool, it is absolutely nonsensical! First Marxism is unfalsifiable, and now it's falsifiable after all as a result of "new evidence" by the bourgeois ideologues. The point of Hegel, and afterwards Marx was not a means of yielding better empirical data but forming a scientific understanding of history and the evolution of the social. Not having "Marxist dogma" isn't going to prevent you from having an unlimited supply of fun-facts, or hollow banalities, but without Marxism understanding historical development is impossible without some kind of implicit metaphysical substrate. Bourgeois ideologues do not even make such a pre-conceived understanding of history as a whole open for debate, it is ideologically implicit. For Marxist historians, and this is even true in pertinence to the "dogmatic" standard of historiography which Soviets were obliged to follow "by law" - rather than being ideological dogma, it was as close to non-ideology as you could get as it designated an explicit reality which could be critically engaged.


Marxism itself perhaps has made inadvertent contributions to historiography, with social and economic history becoming more popular, but the stagist view of history as espoused by Marxists has never and will never be respected as a sound method of analyzing human societies. Even characterizing the English Civil War as a "bourgeois revolution" presumes knowledge of the subject and reduces your ability to analyze the event from a critical standpoint. If someone calls you out on it, it isn't because they have a deep-seeded hatred for Marxism, but because they value sane critical thinking.


For Alexios, historiography, science and all intellectual fields are somehow reserved for "experts", whereby things have to be respected or disregarded in order to qualify as true. This is not some kind of cheap platitude: The existing means of legitimizing truth, by having a monopoly on the means of its validation, measured by knowledge rather than theory, represents nothing more than the absolute subservience of academia by the existing order. Anyone who has a semblance of an understanding of this knows that each year critical theory in universities is more and more discouraged in favor of breeding programs for utilitarian technocrats. What they fear is universalized access to truth by all, or in other words, the establishments of universal coordinates for an understanding of the world. By recognizing the English revolution as a bourgeois revolution, no one makes a substitution for critical engagement with the specifialities or circumstances of the event, as though this is somehow the final word. What it does designate are coordinates for understanding which allow for an understanding of development. It would be ridiculous to say that non-Marxist historians do useless work, translating ancient texts or researching documents from the time is important for understanding it, but no amount of 'evidence' is going to give you a coordinate for understanding. You can uncover as many fossilized remains of extinct species you want, you can date them and you can taxonomize them, but this is not going to automatically grant you an understanding of natural selection or evolution. Marxism gives us a consistent paradigm of understanding historical development, the ability to know why things happen when they do, its relationship to a wider totality and so on. From what you have implied, the "stageist" view of history amounts to nothing more than the recognition of distinct historic epochs and totalities. Nothing has ever 'empirically' disqualified this except implicit ideological mechanisms. So the point has nothing to do with a deep-seeted hatred of Marxism but a predisposition to justify existing conditions of life at every level.

To be clear: Nothing is "wrong" by merit of it not being explicitly identified with historical materialism. The error comes when there is no room left for elaboration, i.e. "religious ideas prompted this" and so on without further qualification - like why did religious ideas at this time prompt this? This is where the debate begins.


Those of us willing to risk damaging our harmony with the Divine Word can go places; you'll continue to look like a fool for as long as you pretend that things written a century and a half ago cannot be flawed in any way.

No, but whatever flaws do exist are only possible within the theoretical paradigm already in place. Those philistines incapable of understanding historical materialism, bound by the baggage of their bourgeois sentimentality or worse, will never be able to recognize these flaws.

[Alexios]

Ostrogorsky (the byzantinist, you mean him, right?) was a first-wave emigre. You're probably thinking of Soviet byzantinist Kazhdan, who emigrated quite late in life.

Kazhdan is another example, but he made less of an impact than Ostrogorsky. The point I was trying to illustrate was that even scholars brought up in the Marxist tradition could make valuable contributions. Ostrogorsky tried to stay within the stagist view and characterized Byzantium in the High Middle Ages as adhering to the 'feudal mode of production,' a thesis that has since been largely disregarded. Yet even still most point to his work as a standard of historiography.



Also this is just wrong. There were a great many bourgeois ideologists (from historians like Charles Beard to economists like Joan Robinson) who were compelled to reckon with Marxism in some way, even if they obviously rejected it, simply because of the power of working-class movements in various countries. Eventually they had comprehensive attacks made on their writings precisely because they sounded too much like Marxism even if they obviously weren't in the view of actual Marxists.


Beard isn't a very relevant example considering he was an independent researcher and thus didn't have to work within the confines of a university. French, West German, and American scholars working within universities, however, brought economic and social history into the Western world and were not subject to mass persecution, even if it was influenced by Marxism. This seems to contradict the conspiracy theory as advocated in this thread.

[Ismail]

Beard isn't a very relevant example considering he was an independent researcher and thus didn't have to work within the confines of a university.And yet his work was still attacked for being "quasi-Marxist" and he himself moved to the right, to the point that by the 1940s he had given up many of his earlier views.


French, West German, and American scholars working within universities, however, brought economic and social history into the Western world and were not subject to mass persecution, even if it was influenced by Marxism. This seems to contradict the conspiracy theory as advocated in this thread.There were a great many academics (Marxist and non-Marxist) who were targeted by McCarthyism. In the 1960s-70s there was the "New Left" which produced a petty-bourgeois caricature of Marxism and likewise sought to oppose the so-called "dogmatism" of earlier periods. While they couldn't be persecuted per se (their late 40s/early 50s predecessors had to suffer, as it were, for widespread revulsion at McCarthyist measures to take root) they were certainly met with obstacles from university administrators among other things.

And then, considering the dead-end politics of the "New Left," it gradually became reconciled with the establishment from the 80s onwards. That's why today you'll see plenty of "Marxists" in academia who will uphold Sartre, Althusser and Marcuse, selectively interpret the writings of Gramsci to justify reformism, etc. They represent no threat to anything. Their "Marxism" is completely hollow and has been "un-dogmatized" pretty much out of any practical use.

[Rafiq]

Beard isn't a very relevant example considering he was an independent researcher and thus didn't have to work within the confines of a university. French, West German, and American scholars working within universities, however, brought economic and social history into the Western world and were not subject to mass persecution, even if it was influenced by Marxism. This seems to contradict the conspiracy theory as advocated in this thread.

What conspiracy theory? of course for a philistine an ideological wave could only be articulated as a conspiracy, rather than a process consequential of political and social changes. Apparently such historians are exempt from historical processes in your mind. There was a widespread assault on Marxism in virtually every domain: the fact that these assaults were inconsistent is obvious evidence that this wasn't coordinated. If such an assault was coordinated in such a way (I mean, I am sure government funding had a lot to do with it, but the ideological changes occurred independently of anyone's plans) this alone would be an affront to reason and would contradict "Marxist dogma" which recognizes ideology not as something which is exercised in a conspiratorial manner (a la mass manipulation) but a force in coincidence with the social.

While there existed no direct persecution, this didn't equip western historians from being exempt from ideology, or innate predispositions, aversions against Marxism. It's not a coincidence that the strength of Marxist "dogma" in western universities coincided with the strength of Marxist politics. For someone so keen on considering themselves "knowledgeable" enough about Marxism to know what to criticize it about, this should be a given. Your notion of truth rests upon what is "disregarded" and what is still held in "high regard" by academia: And while I don't know enough about such works regarding Byzantium, this is not a valid qualification for truth, it is an ideological designation of legitimacy.