Marxist Historians Research Articles

Mussolini’s regime: the concept of consensus in contemporary historiography

One of the pivotal issues in the study of Italian fascism pertains to the question of public consensus under Mussolini’s regime. In the article, the author presents a comprehensive examination of the international historiographic discourse pertaining to this issue, tracing its evolution from the initial works published during the dictatorship to the impassioned debates that arose with the publication of Renzo De Felice’s multi-volume history of the Fascist regime in the 1960–1980s. At the core of De Felice’s research was the examination of the phenomenon of consensus within Italian society between 1920 and 1945. This paper acknowledges the value of De Felice’s contributions but challenges the methodological principles, research methods, and the conceptualisation of fascism as a long-term political strategy, particularly the notion of “Mussolinism” as a distinct form of “left-wing totalitarianism”. De Felice’s interpretation initially posited a consensus comprising new political forces and established elite structures. However, by the mid-1930s, this consensus had acquired a mass character, effectively eliminating the necessity for recourse to violence and endowing Mussolini’s regime with a distinctive quality: “incomplete totalitarianism”. De Felice’s analysis suggests that the collapse of the Fascist regime in Italy was primarily the result of a combination of miscalculations by the military and political leadership, coupled with inherent weaknesses in the system itself, rather than being driven by the erosion of mass consent. The historiographical debate surrounding the issue of consensus has been shaped by the works of Marxist historians and left-wing democrats who have opposed De Felice’s views. Additionally, the perspectives of liberals and regime apologists have contributed to this ongoing discussion. The 1990s saw the debate continue to evolve, encompassing both local and social historical analysis.

‘Corruption talk’ and the politics of class in 21st century Britain

Scholars have diagnosed widespread class disidentification among working-class citizens in contemporary Britain despite high and sustained levels of inequality. Everyday narrations in working-class communities, however, reveal deeply classed accounts of politics and society, even if not expressed in the formal idiom of class. Across our field sites, practices of corruption talk were rife and aided citizens in making sense of their experiences of political powerlessness and economic dispossession. Drawing on political ethnographic studies from working-class areas in Oxford, Corby and Mansfield, and buttressed by survey data, we find that corruption talk can act as an informal political ontology. An analysis of international survey data on corruption perceptions and class identification further substantiates our ethnographic findings about the resonance and character of corruption talk. Following the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, we argue that corruption talk reveals the complex and at times contradictory ways in which marginalised citizens define and narrate their relationship to politics and state power under conditions of class fragmentation. These findings highlight, we argue, the importance of paying attention to vernacular discourses and call into question straightforwardly teleological accounts of the decline of class consciousness in the past 50 years.

«Ukrainian crisis» of the Society of Marxist Historians

The article is devoted to the discussion that unfolded at the turn of the 1920s-30s between "Moscow" and "Ukrainian" historians on the principles of interaction between the Society of Marxist Historians at the Communist Academy and the Ukrainian Society of Marxist Historians. The study of the discussion allows us to come to the problem of building a model of interaction between the center and the regions in Soviet historical science. New documents from the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences demonstrate that the Moscow Society of Marxist Historians, headed by M.N. Pokrovsky set a course to build a relatively centralized model, which was opposed by Ukrainian historians who defended the principles of national communism. The confrontation was open in nature, in which Ukrainian historians relied on the leadership of the Ukrainian SSR. During the so-called "Great Turning Point", a wave of political purges swept through, which hit the Ukrainian intelligentsia hard, among others. After that, the obstacles to the Society of Marxist Historians were removed. However, it also found itself in crisis due to the death of its leader, M.N. Pokrovsky. The fruits of the discussion have already been "reaped" by other institutions: first, the Institute of History at the Communist Academy, and then the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The consequences of the "Ukrainian crisis" were massive. The opponents of building a centralized model of historical science, in which the republican centers were subordinate to the Moscow ones, were eliminated. This directly affected the process of creating the histories of the peoples of the USSR: the overcoming of the territorial historical and cultural approach, associated primarily with the Ukrainian political and intellectual elite, began, and projects appeared to create not individual histories of the republics, but the all-Union history of the USSR.

The Postwar Fight Against Fascism: Auschwitz Memory in Leftist Activism

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the memory activism of three survivors of the Auschwitz resistance and explores the ways in which they linked fascism and genocide to economic exploitation. By doing so, our paper excavates a leftist-antifascist paradigm of postwar memory that waned with the advent of contemporary Holocaust culture. We analyse the memoirs of Oszkár Betlen, Bruno Baum, and Hermann Langbein, members of the international communist movement before, during, and after the Second World War. For these authors, calls to remember Auschwitz were inseparable from a struggle for social change in the present, and their memory practice was never restricted to writing. Therefore, our paper places their memoirs into the wider context of their political-organizational work, and shows that their efforts to commemorate Auschwitz responded to some pressing issues of their time, including the re-militarization and NATO-membership of the Federal Republic, reparations, amnesty and reintegration of former Nazis, and war crimes trials. Importantly, all these issues were intertwined with what they regarded as capitalist restoration and a looming resurgence of fascism. Our paper argues that the so-called economic case was central to their postwar campaigning because they believed that economic exploitation was central to fascism and had wide-ranging implications for postwar societies as well. Furthermore, we challenge the prevailing view on antifascism by demonstrating that for these authors the economic aspect of fascism did not eclipse the genocidal character of fascism and the specifically Jewish experience of it. In contrast to some Marxist historians, they did not see genocidal policies as merely derivative or secondary either. Rather, these leftist-antifascists commemorated Auschwitz in ways which regarded economic exploitation and genocide as interrelated and constitutive aspects of fascism.

The Theme of the East in the Society of Marxist Historians in the Second Half of the 1920s – Early 1930s

Introduction. Oriental studies was not the leading direction in the activities of the society of Marxist historians (the second half of the 1920s – early 1930s), but it played a significant role in bringing this field of knowledge closer to the practical needs of the current policy of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Comintern. Methods and materials. The research is based on traditional methods of historiographical analysis. It uses materials from historical journals of the 1920s and 1930s and archival documents. Analysis. Reports at general meetings of the Society and the History of the East section and publications in the journal “Historian-Marxist” focused on the problems of the history of the national liberation movement in colonial and dependent countries, the policy of tsarist Russia on the southern outskirts of the empire, and socialist transformations in the national republics of the USSR. If in the early years the most influential were the well-known Marxist orientalists M.P. Pavlovich, V.A. Gurko-Kryazhin, and I.M. Reisner, then in the subsequent period Oriental historians who did not have serious scientific authority but firmly adhered to the class approach occupied the leading positions in the society. After the All-Union Conference of Marxist Historians, they focused their attention on criticizing the “old bourgeois schools” in Oriental history and “exposing pseudo-Marxism in their own ranks.” Results. However, they could achieve results in solving only the second task, using, first, discussions about socio-economic formations, about the situation and tasks at the front of the study of the East, and about the non-Marxism of Gurko-Kryazhin’s historical views. The ideological turn of the mid-1930s largely devalued the importance of the research of this generation of Marxist Orientalists, and the authorities recognized the achievements of representatives of academic Oriental studies.

Beynəlxalq münasibətlər diskursunda postkolonializm

Turning to history has always been an important tool for understanding international relations, and this trend remains relevant today. However, if earlier researchers mainly focused on individual events and their possible interpretations, now the main attention is focused on determining the historical characteristics of systems and reflecting this legacy in modern international relations. That is why the postcolonial approach, focused on the gradual evolution of colonial relations into the modern system of international relations, has become especially important; postmodernism is used to explain the concept of postcolonialism. In these concepts, an important place is occupied by the terms colonialism and postcolonialism, which seem to be a continuation of each other, despite the fact that they oppose each other. This article explains some of these concepts. Looking at the development and theoretical history of the concept of postcolonialism, it can be concluded that the concept was first used by Edward Said in his work entitled “Orientalism”. In Edward Said's “Orientalism” (1978) [Said, 1978], although many derivative terms from the concepts of colonialism and imperialism are used, the word postcolonialism does not appear even once in this work. No less important than Edward Said's research into the consolidation of postcolonialism as a concept is Subaltern Studies, first developed by Indian Marxist historians in 1982. Thus, although postcolonialism has not yet reached its final form in terms of naming, thanks to the book "The Empire Writes Back" [Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1989] published in 1989, today both the term and the theoretical concept are used in modern scientific circles.

“Party principles” in the views of Grigory Evseevich Zinoviev

The subject of the article is the views of one of the founders of the Soviet state and the Bolshevik party, G. E. Zinoviev (1883-1936), on the essence and functions of the communist party. This topic is analyzed through the prism of the political biography of the hero, which determined the emphasis placed on the following three points: 1) understanding of the Communist Party, 2) the place of the Party in the Soviet political system, 3) the boundaries of intra-party pluralism. The sources for the analysis are the texts of books, speeches, articles, drafts, brochures and statements of G. E. Zinoviev. In addition to the specified range of sources, the presented work is based on the existing historiography about G. E. Zinoviev (the works of Yu. N. Zhukov, S. S. Voitikov, V. N. Samokhodkin, E. D. Fliginskaya and other researchers). In his work, the author used a materialistic concept (in particular, historical determinism), as well as historical-genetic and historical-typological methods. It is established that Grigory Evseevich Zinoviev had his own formal views on the essence and functions of the Communist Party, which followed the general course of Bolshevism, but also had their own characteristics. Zinoviev's definition of the Communist Party boiled down to recognizing it as the only vanguard and political organization of the proletariat, and the possibility of the existence of only one Communist Party was emphasized, and within this Communist Party the impossibility of forming internal factions was postulated. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that it systematizes the views of such a major Bolshevik and Soviet figure as G. E. Zinoviev on the role and functions of the Communist Party, as well as their inclusion in the history of Marxist and Bolshevik political thought.

A New Discourse on Fengjian: the Redefinition of Fengjian and the Demonization of Federalism

This article examines the evolution of the vocabulary “feudal (fengjian)” in early twentieth-century China. Despite having served as a symbol of local autonomy and countervailing against imperial authority as emphasized in the Confucian tradition, the term had descended into an object of scorn, oppression, and retrogression in the latter half of the twentieth century until today. An alternative interpretation toward the modern misuse of fengjian may be found by focusing and comparing the two seemingly unrelated and radically different portrayals of fengjian by: political thinker Zhang Taiyan’s federalist ideology; and Marxist historian Guo Moruo’s manipulation of Chinese classics. Under the historical context surrounding the turmoil of 1920s China, this article argues that much more than a mistranslation, the redefinition of fengjian was an intentional slander to, through the ambiguity surrounding its definition, destroy the Chinese tradition of liberty and local autonomy, further justifying a unified, highly centralized Chinese nation-state.

Марксистский импульс творчества Джорджа Рюде

The article is devoted to the work of George Rude, a prominent British and Australian historian of the French Revolution. George Rudé, born in Oslo in 1910, moved to London with his Norwegian engineer father and English mother in 1919. He graduated in languages from Cambridge in 1931 and, becoming politically committed, joined the British Communist Party in 1935. He taught languages in private schools until in 1949 when he was dismissed, because of his communist views. He set off for Paris to further his postgraduate studies. His doctoral thesis, defended in 1950 in London, finally resulted in his first book “The Crowd in the French Revolution” (1959). In 1959 Rudé was offered a position at the University of Adelaide and at last got an academic post. His decade in Adelaide from 1960 was to be the most productive of his life. He published or completed a major series of books on French, British and European history. As a Marxist historian, Rudé’s fundamental concern was to explore the ways in which the twin upheavals of the late-eighteenth century – the industrial revolution in England and the French Revolution – radically transformed socio-economic structures, the nature of ruling élites and the social composition and collective protest of urban crowds. Rudé’s great books have been remarkably influential, not only because of their combination of deep erudition and conceptual sweep, but also because of his capacity for lucid, coherent argument about the great transitions in western Europe in the century after 1750. He had profound political convictions but wore his affiliations lightly, even though they at times had harsh consequences. His personal influence on historiography in Australia and elsewhere was profound.

Ideological Campaign or a Fatal Accident? The Discussions of 1928–1930 and the Collapse of Historian M. I. Yavorsky’s Career

This article examines the personality of Matvei Ivanovich Yavorsky, a leading Ukrainian Marxist historian of the 1920s. The article reveals the circumstances that led to the historian’s removal from leading academic positions in the early 1930s. The historiography created an image of Yavorsky as a scholar who suffered under the attacks of Moscow Marxist historians led by M. N. Pokrovsky and his disciple P. O. Gorin. Contrary to popular belief, the author shows that the story of Yavorsky’s downfall was a series of coincidences that led to the transformation of an ideological polemic into a campaign of harassment, followed by his arrest and death. The article explains why the debates of the time were not the cause of Yavorsky’s downfall. Patronage from the Ukrainian party leadership allowed Yavorsky to engage in aggressive polemics with his opponents (primarily Gorin). Discussions within the Ukrainian academic community led to a softening of Yavorsky’s position on conceptual differences (the driving forces of the revolution in Ukraine) rather than a public campaign against him. The author shows that Gorin and Pokrovsky did not have the administrative capacity to start harassing the scholar. The collapse of Yavorsky’s career turned out to be the result of the revealed facts of his biography (service in the Austro-Hungarian army). Yavorsky’s situation did not fit into any of the ideological campaigns of the time and came as a complete surprise to the local party leadership. Attempts to launch a campaign against Yavorsky (“yavorshchina”) were quashed by the Ukrainian SSR leadership, which gave the historian the opportunity to move to Leningrad. There, however, he was caught by the OGPU’s Operation Spring. During the investigation in Ukraine, people who had testified against Yavorsky were implicated in the case. This led to his arrest, imprisonment and death sentence.

Hobsbawm on rebellion in the postcolony: the political economy of armed conflicts in Northern Nigeria

Nigeria’s northwest geopolitical zone is increasingly bedevilled by banditry perpetrated, in part, by aggrieved pastoralists. Pastoralist participation in banditry has been characteristically analysed using theoretical frameworks that portend their violent activities – kidnapping, cattle raiding and murder – as ordinary crimes deriving from ungoverned spaces and socioeconomic deprivation. While such theoretical outlooks shed light on the nature of armed violence in the northwest, they have failed to assess how pastoralist banditry constitutes not so much an ordinary crime but a social crime – a form of resistance against social inequality that stems from the longstanding marginalisation of pastoralism and pastoralists in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. Inspired by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s conception of social banditry, this article contends that pastoral banditry constitutes resistance to conjugated oppression axiomatic from the contradictions of the Nigerian political economy. Resolving the crisis of pastoral banditry in the region therefore requires attending to the marginality of pastoralists by curtailing abuses and providing public goods.

The Reception of the Modern Historiographic Footnote in Twentieth Century China

Abstract In the first half of the twentieth century, it took a long time for modern historiographic footnotes to be accepted as a standard practice of Chinese historiography in professionalization. Although the word “footnote” as a foreign loanword entered Japanese and Chinese dictionaries as early as the first decade of the twentieth century, in the 1920s and 1930s, most historical journals did not adopt footnotes as a typical style requirement. In 1928, when Academia Sinica started publishing its flagship history journal, Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, footnote style was not required. However, some linguists and archaeologists published their papers in this journal with modern footnotes. Gradually, this practice was also accepted by historians. Though many scholars published their works with footnotes in the West, once they returned to Japan, the vertically printed publications pushed them back to the Japanese tradition of no footnotes. However, since the 1930s, footnotes have been accepted more widely. In the 1950s, with the publication of state-sponsored history journals, the modern academic style with footnotes was gradually established. Marxist historians played a vital role in accepting and implementing footnotes by citing classical Marxist works in a standard format to guarantee quotation accuracy.

Re-examine Poppers critique of Marxist Historicism

The challenge of Poppers critique to Marxist philosophy has been the subject of academic research and discussion. However, in recent years, most of the academic rebuttals to Popper are still in opposition to Marxism, and they have not listened reasonably to its academic nature. This paper discusses Poppers criticism of Marxist historicism through comparative analysis, aiming to find the rationality of his criticism, so as to perfect the path of Marxian historical materialism. Through analysis, the article clarifies Poppers stance on Marxist historicism, and objectively excavates the rationality of Poppers criticism, which provides a new thinking about the construction of the cause of human happiness.

Verso of the “Vulgar” Portrait: Georgi Plekhanov’s Anti-Kantianism and Activist Aesthetic

This essay examines Georgi Plekhanov, founder of the Russian Marxist movement and a supposed exemplar of “vulgar Marxism.” It analyses Plekhanov's formulation of a Marxist aesthetic, interrogating the widespread image of Plekhanov's “vulgar” focus on economic determinism and his neglect of cultural forces' influence on revolutionary praxis, locating him instead within a fuller history of Marxist thought. A contextualization of Plekhanov's fin-de-siecle writings on art demonstrates that these texts were effectively a component of his contemporary polemics against critics of Marxist theory, and that within them he was pursuing his polemical agenda of criticizing Kantian philosophy and defending Marxist materialism. These dual aims manifested in Plekhanov's rejection of the Kantian notion of aesthetic disinterestedness and a stress on the formative role class conflict exerted on artistic creation, ultimately resulting in his formulation of an original aesthetic theory prescribing political commitment and thus mobilizing artworks towards revolutionary ends.

On the Possibility of Scientific Socialism. S. N. Bulgakov vs K. Marx

The article deals with criticism by the great Russian philosopher S. N. Bulgakov’s ideas of scientific socialism in his major work “Philosophy of Economics”. Attention is drawn to the fact that Bulgakov’s philosophical basis for this criticism is an indication of the primacy of the theme of justice in a socialist society, which is rationalized in the theory of scientific socialism. Bulgakov shows that in the very history of Marxism, the focus on justice predetermines the desire to build a theory of scientific socialism. Another topic discussed by the philosopher in the framework of his criticism of the idea of scientific socialism is the illegitimacy of Marxism’s assertion about the existence of laws of a natural historical type, in accordance with which the development of society as a whole takes place and which are considered in Marxism as the basis for the possibility of scientific substantiation of the inevitable onset of a future just society. . According to Bulgakov, the scientific nature of social policy is determined by relying not on such laws, but on statistical generalizations, a kind of empirical patterns that express the development trends of certain aspects of social life in specific conditions and in a specific historical period. Another subject of Bulgakov’s criticism is the desire to talk about the development of society as a whole. Scientific research, in his opinion, should be specific and deal with specific aspects of public life. The whole cannot be the subject of scientific research. The article draws attention to the similarity of Bulgakov’s views to the views of K. Popper, set forth by him a quarter of a century after the Russian philosopher in his work “The Poverty of Historicism”. Popper criticizes historicism, by which he understands the concept of the natural development of society as a whole, which inevitably turns into utopianism. Attempts to talk about society as a whole and try to transform it as a whole, he defines as holism, which he contrasts with “partial engineering”. The author of the article notes that the views of these two thinkers, which reveal an undoubted similarity, deserve to be presented in modern discussions about the possibility of social prediction.

Frederick Engels: The First Marxist?

In the history of Marxism since Karl Marx's death, Frederick Engels has cut a controversial figure across the centuries. Through an examination of their correspondence and collaborations, McFarlane presents Engels as not only a stalwart friend and colleague to Marx, but a fascinating organizer, editor, and strategist in his own right.

Cultural competition in the Italian Left: Mario Spinella and the beginnings of La scienza nuova book series*

ABSTRACT Between the 1960s and the 1970s, Marxism reached its maximum success in Italy, but that phase also corresponded to the crisis of the Italian Communist Party’s cultural hegemony, challenged by both the attacks coming from the New Left and innovative readings of Marx’s works. Marxist historicism, on which the Italian Communist Party had based its cultural policy after the the Second World War, consequently suffered heavy attacks. This article illuminates one of the responses to historicism’s decline, providing an account of the book series La Scienza Nuova, issued by the publishing house Dedalo in Bari and edited by the communist intellectual Mario Spinella, who was able to remain loyal to his party demonstrating, at the same time, cultural autonomy. Also grounding on archival documents, the article posits that Spinella’s aim was to attract New Left readers by selecting books on topics and by authors that were in fashion in Italy and abroad, but incorporating them into a theoretical framework based on Marxist historicism, in order to preserve the latter in an evolving cultural environment.

No natural colonization: the early Soviet school of historical anti-colonialism

ABSTRACT This paper discusses Soviet Marxist historical narratives of the 1920s and early 1930s that sought to reframe Russian history as a process driven by commercial capital and analyzed Russian territorial expansion and its historical scholarship in terms such as settler colonialism and indigenous erasure. As of now, the corpus of works by early Soviet Marxist historians still represents the most massive and sustained effort to challenge imperial narratives of Russian history from within the Russian academic community. Resonating with current conversations about Russian imperialism and colonialism, this intellectual tradition represents a major contribution to the postcolonial turn in studies of Russian history.

역사학자 박시형의 민족과 과학

Park Si-hyeong, who studied historiography at Keijō Imperial University, participated in the Chintan Society to develop scientific modern positivist historiography and at the same time published a number of enlightening articles about the culture and traditions of Korea in popular magazines. Si-hyeong’s historical studies during the colonial period can be evaluated as pursuing the science and the nation. Immediately after liberation, Park Si-hyeong was active as a Marxist historian in the atmosphere of left-right collaboration.BR After going to North Korea in August 1946, he led the establishment of North Korean historiography by serving as a teacher at Kim Il-sung University and as director of the Institute of History at the Academy of Sciences. History of Joseon Land Institutions, published in 1960 and 1961, was the result of scientific Marxist historiography that compiled his research since his graduation thesis at Keijō Imperial University, based on the theory of feudal state ownership.BR Park Si-hyeong turned to ancient history research in the 1960s. “For the Study of Balhae History”, published in 1962, is a monumental thesis that placed Balhae in Korean history, and is evaluated as laying the groundwork for future research on Balhae history in the academia of North and South Korea. In addition, Si-hyeong’s interpretation of the tombstone of King Gwanggaeto succeeded to Jeong In-bo’s interpretation. It can be seen that the focus of historiography has shifted from science to nation. Since the 1980s, as the Cold War order has been shaken, East Asian historical exchanges have been in full swing. Si-hyeong visited Japan and China and took on the role of advocating nationalist history common to two Koreas. Even in the South Korean media in the 1980s and 1990s, Park Si-hyeong was introduced as a nationalist historian.

范文瀾의 학술궤적과『中國通史簡編』저술 배경 - 중화인민공화국의 흠정사서는 어떻게 탄생했나? -

This article aims to reveal the politicization of Marxist history in the founding period of modern China(PRC), by following Fan Wenlan’s academic trajectory. Fan’s academic career began with studying the Chinese traditional classics at the Peking university. He partook, however, in progressive movements in 1920s, with a close relation to the Communist party, and engaged in the anti-Japan resistance in 1930s. When political circumstances made the resistance impossible, he joined the Communist party in 1939 and moved into Yenan: It may be inferred that he agreed to shape a new model of the Chinese national identity, reexamining the anti-Japan resistance and the Chinese tradition. At that time, the Chinese communists needed their own historical narrative as an ideology to establish a new regime founded upon Mao’s authority. Fan’s Brief history of China served that purpose.BR Fan’s Brief History imitated the Soviet History, written upon the Stalinist line, which determined the Chinese official line. Accordingly, Fan based on the Five Species Social Form theory, denies the Asian production mode theory. He also accepted the doctrine of class conflicts in history and replaced the idea of stagnation of the past with the developmental point of view. Unlike the Stalinist line, however, he confined the history of China to Han Chinese, which originated from the Qin and Han empires. Fan’s approach left behind two tasks; How to forge an idea of people, including minorities in China, and how to overcome the prejudices against Asia presupposed in the doctrine of the Asiatic mode of production.