Marxist Historians Research Articles

Connected and entangled histories: writing histories of education in the Indian context

This article examines contestations and recent trend-setting approaches in the historiography of education in India in the post-1800 period. British colonialism created a huge rupture in South Asian society as regards the provision of education. Historians of education have asked what sorts of indigenous educational institutions and methods were present in pre-colonial India: in this context, the article discusses the work of historians who researched indigenous Indian village schools, key to educational transmission until the early nineteenth century. The educational work of the nationalist leader M.K. Gandhi inflected the work of such educational historians. The article devotes some attention to ways in which twentieth-century ‘new education’ reinvented aspects of pre-colonial South Asian education. Marxist, feminist, Dalit and Subaltern historians of education have analysed the differential and hierarchised spread of ‘western’ education in South Asia. Nonetheless, this article shows how the educational agency of Dalits, women, peasants and working people has been analysed by scholars. The article then examines recent scholarship which views the origins and growth of ‘western’ education in South Asia in the framework of transcultural transactions. It ends from the vantage point of connected and entangled histories of education, looking beyond the unit of the nation state.

Ijtihad into philosophy: Islam as cultural heritage in post-Stalinist Daghestan

Starting in 1960, authors of various Daghestani nationalities initiated a re-evaluation of the role of Islam in the history of Daghestan. An important historical personality to draw upon was Muhammad al-Quduqi, a Daghestani Islamic legal scholar of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Quduqi was known for his sympathies towards ijtihad (Islamic legal reasoning by analogy) and for his call to replace customary law by Islamic law. This article studies how Quduqi was brought back into Soviet discourse in 1960, and how his advocacy for ijtihad was subsequently interpreted in Marxist terms as a quest for philosophy, rationalism and progress, with secularizing terms drawn from the discourse of Daghestani Jadids of the 1920s and 1930s. A comparison is then made with Soviet Tatarstan, where Marxist historians constructed a similar autochthonous trajectory of Tatar-Islamic progress and enlightenment. In both cases, Islamic concepts were taken out of context and used for the construction of a secularized national Muslim cultural heritage (miras) that would prepare the ground for socialism – with the difference that in Daghestan, this Muslim Mirasism was multi-ethnic in character.

Post-colonial historiography and the polemicist's task: understanding Perry Anderson's Indian Ideology

In three articles in the London Review of Books (LRB), Marxist historian Perry Anderson presented a sweeping, synoptic polemic on modern India.1 Re-cast as extensively footnoted chapters entitled ‘...

Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez y el otro marxismo

In this note, Bolívar Echeverría highlights the importance of Sánchez Vázquez in the history of marxism, since 1950’s until the end of the 19th century. Echeverría observes the importance and radicality of Spanish philosopher’s philosophical approaches. From the debates with Althusser, Sartre and the dogmatic marxism, until the defence of radical democracy and the critic to the dictatorship of the Capital, the author reminds us of the state of being in force of Sánchez Vázquez’s work.

Plekhánov e a crítica estética marxista: entre a intenção e o gesto

Georgi Plekhánov é parada obrigatória para quem se dedica a compreender a trajetória do marxismo na Rússia. Além de introduzir textos clássicos de Marx no país, foi responsável pelas diretrizes políticas que guiaram o movimento operário organizado até por volta de 1914 e por escrever textos de crítica estética inovadores nesse campo de pensamento. Este artigo se debruçará sobre esta última faceta de seu trabalho, mais depurada em seu ensaio Arte e Vida Social, de 1912, a fim de compreender como suas formulações, atravessadas que estavam pelas contradições de um método restritivo, não deixaram de trazer contribuições significativas para o entendimento do que denominava “especificidade do estético”. Em um debate direto com a tradição bielinskiana, Plekhánov soube com ela dialogar e desbravar um campo de conhecimento até então praticamente inexplorado no marxismo.

A Postcolonial Reading of the Sonderweg: Marxist Historicism Revisted

A Postcolonial Reading of the Sonderweg: Marxist Historicism Revisted This article deals with the Sonderweg thesis by reconciling David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley's criticism of the German Sonderweg with a postcolonial critique of Marxist historicism. The global trajectory of Marxist historiography shows that the «singularity » of the Sonderweg came to be conceptually translated as «particularity» within the Eurocentric and capitalocentric «universality». This sublime transmutation of the singularity into the particularity through the Leninist trope of the «Prussian path» implies the temporalisation of historical spaces in a linear development scheme, which accommodates global historicist time in a twisted form of «first in Europe, then elsewhere». A postcolonial reading of the Sonderweg throws light on Marxist historiographical debates on colonial modernity versus Sonderwege by subjecting the Eurocentric conception of the «Prussian path» to the complexity of global modernity.

Towards a libertarian turn? Notes on the past and future of radical urban research and praxis

Marxists have always tried to present the history of the workers' movement as if it were the history of Marxist organising efforts, and the history of critical ideas as if it were the history of Marxist thought; consequently, the crisis of Marxism has been presented as a crisis of radical thought as such. However, new radical social movements and thinkers have appeared during the last two decades - and a libertarian flavour is a common feature of many of these movements and thinkers. It would be wrong to exaggerate the contemporary role of libertarian thought and praxis, as some of them still present Marxist discursive or even practical elements; that is to say, some of them are more or less ‘hybrid.’ But it would be equally wrong to deny the relevance of a clear, present-day resurgence of libertarian ideas and ideals. The scenario of a widespread ‘libertarian turn’ similar to the ‘radical [≈ Marxist] turn’ of the 1970s is for several reasons unlikely. Nonetheless, considering some current trends, the hypothesis of a ‘mid-ranged’ or ‘partial’ libertarian turn is totally plausible. In fact, my hypothesis is that such a ‘libertarian turn’ is already ongoing. How can socio-spatial research in general, and urban studies in particular, help us understand (and perhaps inspire or at least support) the (re)new(ed) forms of insurgent praxis and thinking we have witnessed in the last two decades? And to what extent will the libertarians (activists, academics and scholars-activists) be able to explore and use the currently existing room for manoeuvre?

Darcus Howe: A Political Biography. By Robin Bunce and Paul Field.

This is a long overdue and badly needed biographical portrait of the black Trinidadian political radical and broadcaster Darcus Howe, who as one of the leading ideological agitators of the British Black Power Movement made a critical contribution to the shaping of modern multiracial and multicultural ‘postcolonial’ Britain after his arrival in the ‘Mother Country’ in 1961. Howe’s life is a rich one and well-lived: from birth in colonial Trinidad in 1943 as a teenaged campaigner for ‘West Indian self-government’ in Eric William’s People’s National Movement, to someone who, after making the move to Britain as an aspiring 18-year-old law student, as his biographers Robin Bunce and Paul Field note, ‘made Britain his home, fighting all the while for immigrants to enjoy the full rights of citizenship without having to renounce their history or identity: to integrate on their own terms’ (p. 2). Bunce and Field detail how Howe, following in the footsteps of his great uncle and mentor, the Trinidadian Marxist historian C.L.R. James, intellectually fused ‘English and Caribbean radicalism’, noting that in the face of the British colonial myth of the ‘civilizing mission’, ‘Howe and the Black Power Movement would civilize Britain by challenging the state-licensed barbarism of the Metropolitan Police (Met), by teaching Britain to become a harmonious multiracial society through bringing “reason to race” ’ (p. 2). The pioneering efforts of Bunce and Field, undertaken in close collaboration with Howe himself and his partner, Leila Hassan, mean that for the first time the essential facts of Howe’s life and work are presented in one volume, complete with some remarkable photographs. At least some aspects of the fascinating, gripping, and often inspiring record of activism and campaigning that emerges will doubtless be new to the vast majority of readers, and the authors are to be commended for making this such an accessible and readable narrative that illuminates the wider civil rights and black liberation struggle in Britain.

François Furet: A melancholy revisionist?

François Furet: A melancholy revisionist? Arthur Goldhammer (bio) Review of Chirstophe Prochasson , François Furet : Les chemins de la mélancolie. Paris : Stock , 2013 . 558 p. When asked to write an intellectual biography of François Furet, Christophe Prochasson surely knew he faced a daunting task. Twenty-five years ago, as France celebrated the Bicentennial of the French Revolution and communist domination of Eastern Europe crumbled, Furet’s reputation and influence stood at a pinnacle. No one had done more than he to wrest the interpretation of the Revolution from the Marxist historians who in his view had shoehorned it into a Procrustean bed of party-sanctioned dogma, and no one had done more to explore “the past of an illusion” that had induced so many young French intellectuals, including himself, to devote years of their lives to the party. Because the demise of communism defined the epoch, the crown of epochal historian devolved on Furet. A quarter of a century later, the landscape looks rather different. The pastness of the past has reasserted itself, and many people today must find it difficult to imagine that interpreting the French Revolution “correctly” could once have seemed a vital prerequisite to situating oneself properly in the present. Academic historians—a tribe among whom Furet lived at best uncomfortably—prefer it this way. A hundred interpretive schools have bloomed, and none is in danger of achieving the ideological hegemony that academics fear more than [End Page 209] the seductions of historiographic fashion or the curse of antiquarian irrelevance. In a sense, the very magnitude of Furet’s success has become an obstacle to understanding what he achieved or why he thought it important. This, as Prochasson suggests, was one source of the “melancholy” under the sign of which he sets his essay in biography. That said, the choice of “melancholy” as a unifying thread for a book about Furet might seem strange. How could a historian who had accumulated celebrity, influence, institutional power, and professional acclaim be described as melancholy? To be sure, every life contains its share of private disappointments and frustrated ambitions, but Prochasson has almost nothing to say about either Furet’s private life or the battles in which he engaged as head of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). We do learn that Furet suffered as a young man from tuberculosis, which left him confined to a sanatorium for lengthy periods. This enforced confinement proved to be a boon to the young scholar. The sanatorium contained a library of 25,000 books and provided a quiet environment in which to read them and prepare a licence en droit. His conversion to history came while still convalescing, when he forged ties with a number of young communist history students who would remain lifelong friends, including Mona and Jacques Ozouf, Alain Besançon, Maurice Agulhon, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Furet’s initial engagement with history thus coincided with his initial engagement with communism, the story of which comprises the first fifth of the book. We learn little about Furet’s activities as a militant. Very likely what Le Roy Ladurie says of himself—that adherence to the party was the cure for his “Robinsonism,” his “love-hate relationship with solitude”— was also true of Furet. Alain Besançon recalls the keen pleasure of conversations among comrades in a left-wing student milieu freed from the oppressive conformism of Sciences-Po. It was in the Saint-Just Cell that Furet met his first wife, Jeannette Rouil. In the same milieu, Denis Richet, with whom he would later collaborate on the book that first gained him notoriety, met and married Furet’s sister. Whatever else communism may have meant to Furet, it provided him with a network of close friends with similar intellectual and political interests, and this, as much as any ideological attraction, must have complicated his exit from its orbit. Prochasson adds the interesting observation that, in the French [End Page 210] academic world in the 1950s, communism functioned as “une savonnette à vilains: the sorbonnard Furet, who had failed to join the normalienne nobility, found another way in by way of political commitment” to communism. [48...

Dewey, Hook et Mao : quelques affinités entre marxisme et pragmatisme

The history of Marxism and of pragmatism have made it difficult for us to imagine today that they were once closely related, in various respects. This has resulted in an underestimation of the affinities between the philosophies of Marx and Dewey or of the influence exercised by Dewey on Marxism in the United States, via Hook, and in China, via Mao. The latter point is indeed the one least well known. Mao drew on Dewey prior to his conversion to Marxism, his approach to which would continue to be durably influenced by the echo of a number of Deweyan themes : the political importance of education, the instrumentalist and pluralist conception of the relation between theory and practice, the invocation of a concept of inquiry. Today it has become possible for us to acknowledge that the history of the 20th century is not exactly what we believe it to be, with the result that we can therefore reconsider the manner in which we inherit it.

HOW TO CHANGE HISTORY

ABSTRACTThe recent death of Eric Hobsbawm provides a fitting occasion to take stock of the entire trajectory of his work. Taking his final book, How to Change the World, as its starting point, this essay considers Hobsbawm's effort to change the way history was written. It divides his career into three main phases: 1) during the 1940s and 50s when he served his apprenticeship and emerged as a leading labor historian of modern Britain. Working in conjunction with colleagues in the Communist Party Historian's group, Hobsbawm helped to raise Marxist history to academic respectability; 2) during the 1960s and 70s, Hobsbawm reached the apogee of his career, publishing the first two volumes of his synoptic history of modern capitalism, as well a multitude of more specialized and critical works. No longer just one among a group of Marxist scholars, he—along with E. P. Thompson—became one of the most famous and influential historians in the world. 3) For Hobsbawm, as for other Marxists, the 1980s and 1990s were a time of crisis, when Marxism was destabilized and communism collapsed. Ironically, this essay argues, it was during this challenging period that Hobsbawm's most influential work appeared—most notably, his studies of modern nationalism and his analysis of the “invention of tradition”. Whereas the early Hobsbawm had worked to bring Marxist history into the academy, the later Hobsbawm (perhaps inadvertently) showed how the academy could absorb analytical elements initially formulated in a Marxist framework by translating them into non‐Marxist terms. Whatever one thinks of Hobsbawm's intellectual legacy, one must acknowledge his status as a polymathic giant who wrote global history that was at once theoretically grounded, publicly accessible, and historiographically consequential.

DESAFIOS DA HISTÓRIA DA EDUCAÇÃO NA PERSPECTIVA MARXISTA

O texto desvela os desafios que a teoria marxista e sua concepção de história, em interlocução com a primeira geração da Escola Des Annales, coloca à História da Educação. Este estudo ainda ressalta o caráter ético- político da concepção de história marxista, no debate com setores pós-modernos. Também, apresenta o compromisso revolucionário e emancipatório dessa perspectiva para a pesquisa e o ensino da História da Educação

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012): Some Questions from a Never-completed Conversation About History

Eric Hobsbawm died in 2012, celebrated as a great Marxist historian. This reputation overrode criticisms of his persistent refusal to radically break with Stalinism. This essay revisits a left-wing critique—by two former Communist Party members who left the Party in 1956 after Khrushchev's ‘secret speech’ and the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution—which shows how Hobsbawm's politics influenced his history. It argues for collective work to establish a new theoretical basis for a Marxist approach to history.

The Promise of the 1821 Revolution and the Suffering Body. Some thoughts on Modernisation and Anti-intellectualism

How can we understand and interpret the popular narrative of the 1821 revolution that speaks for the suffering body of the fighter while it reproaches the "Frenchified heterochthons" and conveys a kind of anti intellectualism (defined broadly and loosely by Merle Curti as "a suspicion of, opposition to, or derogation of intellectuals")? The popular view of 1821 has its origins in the memoirs of the "freedom fighters" written after the War of Independence. Its main motifs travelled from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century and lent themselves to multiple readings and various ideological uses. Although it has a socio political content, it cannot be explained in terms of a grand narrative of class war, as some Marxist historians of the twentieth century argue; neither can it be understood in terms of the grand narrative of Greek modernisation, that is, as a survival from a previous stage of historical development, a relic from the past, even though it draws its motives from traditional sources and idealises the role of chieftains in the War of Independence. I suggest that we approach the anti-intellectualism of the early nineteenth century from an anti-essentialist perspective of Greek history that highlights the Janus-face of modernisation and the ambivalent nature of modern ideologies (especially of popular nationalism) with regard to the relation between the intellectual and the people or the nation.

Rethinking the “Other Transition”: Towards an Alternative Marxist Explanation

After a long hiatus, Marxist historians are once again debating the “other transition”: from ancient society to feudalism. Considerable improvements in empirical knowledge have not, however, been matched by bold advances in historical materialist theory. Prominent contributors now question whether any meaningful transition occurred at all, emphasizing the persistence of feudalism (Wickham) or the maturation of an incipient capitalism (Banaji). In this, they reproduce a central methodological shortcoming of Perry Anderson's pioneering work, which is a reluctance to think beyond the “mode of production” concept itself. The alternative concept of mode of exploitation focuses on the multiple “political” mechanisms by which surplus was extracted from direct producers. In Merovingian and Carolingian Gaul, the manorial exploitation of free and unfree tenants, as well as state (“public”) exploitation of the landowning, arms-bearing peasantry, generated a social logic distinct from both the late Roman Empire and early Frankish feudalism. There was not just one “transition,” but two.

So In-sik's Communism and the East Asian Community (1937 - 40)

This article discusses the philosophical works of Sŏ In-sik, who published mainly between 1937 and 1940, following his five-year imprisonment as a member of the M-L (Marxist-Leninist) group and the Korean Communist Party. While it recognizes a major shift in his thinking in 1938, this article questions the assertion that the “preconversion” and “postconversion” works can be strictly separated in terms of their content. Rather than making an immediately political argument, it examines the contemporaneity of Japanese and Korean philosophy of the 1930s and 1940s, through close readings that open up the conceptual and practical problems of imperial nationalism, Marxist historicism, and universality. The first part discusses Sŏ’s early work on the contradictory character of the intellect under capitalism and his idealization of the laboring human. The second part addresses Sŏ’s so-called “conversion” to supporting the Japanese empire, through textual analysis that highlights the continuities and discontinuities between his earlier Hegelian-Marxist philosophy of history and his later concerns with cultural crisis and Kyoto School dialectics. The third part looks more specifically at Sŏ’s “disguising” of his Marxist view of history behind a Hegelian logic of nation-state formation and discusses the problem of mimesis and representation in the inversion of Hegel.

John Molyneux and the Question of Art

In the last decade or so the Young British Artists movement has sustained a bitter controversy. The movement itself seems to polarize commentators in a vivid opposition. Those who think an unmade bed or a shark pickled in formaldehyde are creations that only someone with more money than sense could regard as genuine art, and those who believe that they are significant works in their own right. The attitude of the Marxist commentariat to this movement has generally tended to be positive. Prominent Marxist and art historian John Molyneux has devoted considerable space to a defence of figures like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, arguing that their work provides a continuation of the most radical and imaginative artistic traditions in the spirit of ‘Giotto and Brueghel, Hals and Rembrandt, Hogarth and Goya, Courbet, Picasso and Warhol’. In his article ‘The Legitimacy of Modern Art’, Molyneux offers a systematic defence of the Young British Artists movement, striving to show how the work of these artists is underpinned by a profoundly revolutionary and democratic current. This article offers a decisive rebuttal to Molyneux's position. It attempts to show that much of the ‘art’ of the so called Young British Artists is little more than spectacle; that their work is incubated in an isolated and rarefied realm dominated by slick patrons and investors, and consequently attains an empty and vacant character. An emperor without clothes. Furthermore, the author attempts to locate the germ of Molyneux's theoretical confusion in an unconscious conflation of the Marxist categories of ‘use’ and ‘exchange’ value. Finally, through a critique of Molyneux, the writer hopes to elucidate in outline a more viable and genuinely Marxist answer to the question—What is Art?

British Marxist Historians: An Appraisal

This paper examines several of the leading British Marxist historians of the twentieth century and the contribution made by these Marxist historians to the field of historiography. The differences and similarities in the arguments presented by key Marxist historians is examined and critically analysed throughout this paper to identify the role these historians within the field.

A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science by Nikolai Krementsov (review)

Reviewed by: A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science by Nikolai Krementsov Paul Josephson (bio) A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science. By Nikolai Krementsov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. xii+175. $35. Alexander Bogdanov was a Bolshevik Renaissance man. A physician, psychologist, economist, philosopher, and science fiction author, Bogdanov wrote on a variety of topics. He is best known as the foil for Vladimir Lenin's Materialism and Empiricism (1908) in which Lenin attacked Bogdanov's epistemology. In A Martian Stranded on Earth, Nikolai Krementsov provides much more than a biography. He not only tells a captivating story, he makes significant contributions to the fields of Russian and Soviet history, history of science, and history of Marxist thought. He explores Bogdanov's education, revolutionary activity, and contributions to Marxist political economy as well as his training in medicine and the influences on his thinking of Spencerian positivism, Darwinian evolutionism, and Haeckelian monism. Bogdanov and other Left Bolsheviks including Anatoly Lunacharsky, Alexandra Kollontai, and Maxim Gorky opposed Lenin's doctrinaire and rigid Marxism that emphasized the role of the Party over the working class. They strived for a reinterpretation of Marxist theory that gave culture a central role, and in a way "deified" the worker and his potential contributions to culture through "god-building" that sought the higher good for the working class. Not only in his voluminous writings on political economy and medicine, but also in science fiction, which was then popular in Russia, Bogdanov explored these ideas. In Red Star (1908) he described the adventures of a young revolutionary from Earth who visits Mars where he encounters socialism—a collectivist Martian society devoid of individualism. The Martians have managed to prolong life through exchange of blood among inhabitants. This reflected Bogdanov's vision of a new society physiologically united and rejuvenated by blood exchanges, and reflected his desire to achieve this in practice through blood transfusions after the 1917 Revolution. Bogdanov declined the invitation of his brother-in-law, Lunacharsky, to take a position in the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Education). Bogdanov was a visionary who pondered whither proletarian culture, science, and literature after the Revolution in the Proletkult movement, serving as one of its leaders. Lenin distrusted Proletkult since the Bolsheviks had little influence over the workers in the organization. He emasculated Proletkult and approved attacks on Bogdanov's publications. Fearing for his life, Bogdanov left the country, joining the Soviet trade delegation in London. On his return he was arrested, interrogated, and released with the understanding that he must cease political activities. [End Page 197] At this point, Bogdanov turned to blood research. Krementsov examines the history of blood research, services, and transfusions in Soviet Russia within the context of a "mini" revolution associated with the introduction of experimental methods in studies of life, death, and disease. He chronicles the rapid expansion of the life sciences and the rise of big science in Soviet Russia. The Commissariat of Health, for example, supported Bogdanov's research while at the same time it established a series of councils, bureaucracies, and institutes to support public health. Scientists successfully gained funding for research in part because Soviet leaders recognized that they required better health care for themselves. All of this led to formation of the Institute of Blood Transfusion in early 1926, where Bogdanov turned to the struggle against aging and for rejuvenation. He eventually died as the result of an experiment he performed on himself. Krementsov concludes his study with a discussion of the fact that in Soviet Russia there were no national standards for or laws regarding transfusion, and no standards for paid and unpaid donors, until Stalin's revolution from above that centralized the organization of the science. A personal note: I have been fascinated by Bogdanov for years, and often had my own dream to write his biography. I am thrilled that Krementsov has written such a wonderful, readable, short (126 pages), comprehensive, and delightful book. Paul Josephson Paul Josephson teaches at Colby College and is the lead author of a forthcoming environmental history of the former Soviet Union and a book on Soviet arctic...

Retour sur les critiques anarchistes du marxisme

There is a tendency evident in the various strands of contemporary anarchism to ignore both Marx, Marxism and the history of Marxism, and the critiques formulated by the anarchist tradition. Against this tendency, the aim of the present article is to emphasize both the contemporary relevance of these critiques and the contribution of Marxism to a radical critique of all forms of domination. It therefore recalls the role played by the critique of Marxism in the elaboration of the anarchist movement, whether for the philosophy of history, the status of the political, the role of organization, or the postulate that the revolutionary subject is to be exclusively identified with the proletariat. While some of the critiques are aimed more at the Second International than at Marx himself, they do however retain their relevance in our present situation. They are, furthermore, here coupled with the attempt to go beyond the exclusive partiality of these two traditions, the Marxist and the anarchist. The question of self-emancipation thus finally emerges as the most important and problematic heritage of the conflict between Marxism and anarchism.