The two historians in question are both of interest but more generally Marxists have boxed themselves into a corner from which there is no escape, and no path to the future. The passage below is the standard tactic to cite the devastating critiques of Marxism, as if to cite them shows, well, we know all that but,… This tactic creates great confusion and has essentially stalled the left with Marxist dogmatism. The critiques offered are more or less final and Marxist true believers can’t really evade that. One grows impatient with the cultic rigidity here. A better tactic is to see that the time has come, long since in fact, to start over with a new formulation that can acknowledge the critiques. Marxists are dreary in their obstinate refusal to see that the critiques as below are an enjoinder to move on. The question of history eluded Marx, and the standard critique below shows why. Marxism is a lost cause theoretically. I have shown in The Last Revolution how easy it is to move on. Marx ended up crippling socialism. Time to start over, time is short.
In the discipline of history in particular, the Marxist approach is now frequently criticized as economically deterministic, failing to account for human agency, and reducing complex historical developments to the unchangeable processes of economic systems. In the crudest interpretations of Marx’s writings, all ideology, law, politics, culture, and civil society is reducible to the makeup of the economic base; the study of historical development becomes an unchangeable science, accessible with only a Marxian understanding of economic exploitation.
1848+: The End(s) of History 