17 Marxists

17.1 Poulantzas

Tooze

Marxism and history

One concern of Marxists reading Louis Althusser in the 1960s-70s was to dethrone an image of history as a practice equipped with its own adequate theoretical apparatus, insisting instead on the need for a theory of the social totality that explained continuity and change in ways more sophisticated than the historian’s easy emphasis on events and trends:

It is very important to welcome work of this provocative power and subtlety, and the welcome it deserves is a critique which tries to take the argument forward, rather than throwing it back. Anything less would be a disservice to Poulantzas’s project — a political project which Marxists cannot ignore or brush aside. Not to take Poulantzas’s history seriously would also merely confirm the bankruptcy of self-confessed historians, trained generally to a level of sophistication little more demanding than that represented by the supposed distinction between facts and ideas. If we must learn to elaborate a problematic which will not turn history into a prolonged tautology, we must also realise that history conceived unproblematically is reduced to the category of the factitious. Though the latter fate is often unthinkingly embraced by historians, no Marxist should be satisfied to be numbered in their company. (Source: Jane Caplan, “Theories of Fascism: Nicos Poulantzas as Historian”, History Workshop Journal, 1977, pp. 83-100.)

Tooze (2023) China’s housing blues, the new S in ESG, humanity’s history and Mao in the Middle East