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Please recommend some Marxist history

anglolawyer

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anglolawyer
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Where history is concerned, I am a Marxist. I believe that history is about class war and that the historical dialectic is the best explanation of the past. I reject as facile and bourgeois the idea that history is just a bunch of famous people doing things.

Unfortunately, I have found very little readable history that fortifies my prejudices and I am hoping for some recommendations. As payment, I offer a very readable and funny example of what I mean by Marxist, or anti-bourgeois, history:

Vive la Revolution by Mark Steel

The book covers the French Revolution, which elevated the bourgeoisie above the landed interests of feudalism. Mark Steel is a popular comedian with a background in far left politics. Comedy is one of the few ways to penetrate the carapace of bourgeos thinking. As one reviewer said, 'if Mark Steel were in charge of the revolution, it might not be a bad idea'.
 
Have you read any Eric Hobsbawm?
His "Ages" trilogy, for instance?

For something slightly different, try London: a Biography by Peter Ackroyd.

Whilst not explicitly about class struggle it does take the view that the history of London is the history of the mob.
 
brodski said:
Have you read any Eric Hobsbawm?
His "Ages" trilogy, for instance?

For something slightly different, try London: a Biography by Peter Ackroyd.

Whilst not explicitly about class struggle it does take the view that the history of London is the history of the mob.
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Age of Revolution? Was that one of them? Don't think I got very far with it. Maybe I should try again. It was a long time ago.
 
anglolawyer said:
Age of Revolution? Was that one of them? Don't think I got very far with it. Maybe I should try again. It was a long time ago.
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They are The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875; The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 and The Age of Extremes.
 
anglolawyer said:
Hmm, I might give him another go. I don't have good memories though. Dunno why.
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Well, he's no Mark Steel. John O'Farrel has written a couple of history books which may be more along those lines- I read his first one a few years back and it was pretty good.
 
What about something on the English Civil War, to pick a topic, that does not consist of drivel about Charles being a devious Scot and Cromwell being forceful etc (both no doubt true and even interesting) but which accounts for the social upheaval in a satisfying way.

Last night we had a TV programme about Ann Boleyn and what got her head chopped off. Did she really shag her brother and a bunch of other guys? How interesting they used a sword not an axe etc. Was she framed because Henry wanted to beget a son with somebody else? Then by a quirk of scheduling, we get another programme on the same station tonight about Thomas Cromwell, the architect of her downfall. Again, all very dramatic but this one went a little further in locating the episode in the wider context of The Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries. One interesting fact was that just a single one of the 800 or so monasteries liquidated by Cromwell had an income twice that of the king. That sets one to thinking about church and state and their relations with property. Ann Boleyn seems to have represented or embodied a conservative or reactionary tendency in this upheaval while Cromwell was a zealot who paid with his head for foisting an ugly wife no. 4 on the King and making too many enemies among the feudal aristocrats who seem to have accumulated grievances against him.

All of which is tantalsing but slightly unsatisfactory in being incomplete. I always have the feeling that cause and effect in bourgeois history just don't work, the former being insufficient to explain the latter. I do, in fact, have quite a good book on the civil war somewhere which does go into the large scale forces which drove the event. I will see if I can dig it out because it's a good example of what I mean.
 
anglolawyer said:
What about something on the English Civil War, to pick a topic, that does not consist of drivel about Charles being a devious Scot and Cromwell being forceful etc (both no doubt true and even interesting) but which accounts for the social upheaval in a satisfying way.
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I think one of the most famous books by a Marxist historian around that time period was Christopher Hill who wrote, The World Turned Upside Down.
 
Doghouse Reilly said:
That book is not good.

ETA: It's excessively myopic in the way he attempts to squeeze every single event in US history into the view of the tiny lens of his ideology. It's not history, it's dogma.
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Marxist history is not easy. There is a risk of being overly deterministic. It's not easy to settle on the right formulations. Maybe Marx was good at it! :)
 
anglolawyer said:
Marxist history is not easy. There is a risk of being overly deterministic. It's not easy to settle on the right formulations. Maybe Marx was good at it! :)
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Does the understanding of history consist in settling on the "right formulations"? More generally, are ideological predispositions to be sought in sources of historical information - or on the contrary should they be discounted and, as far as possible, removed?
 
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