MadMedico posted:swirlsofhistory posted:
Actually it's racist crap
pls explain.
Sympathy for copperheads and draft rioters with a heavy dose of Lincoln was the real racist! apologism.
But besides that, there is nothing historical materialist about trying to shoehorn history into a story about elites versus the people, or powerful classes versus powerless classes. Zinn's A People's History and authors who have contributed to the People's History series share the fixation of the American new left on 'history from below', an approach that is at odds with marxist historical materialism in privileging explanation in terms of identity (including so-called class identity) to the exclusion of a real analysis of the economic basis of social life and how the causes of conflict between classes arise from an incompatibility between the legal superstructure and the economic basis of society. It's instructive in dispelling the myth that history from below is an inherently leftist approrach when consistent application leads to a defense of reactionaries against progressives when the latter have power.
peepaw posted:oh okay so you actually haven't read that book, just the amazon summary
Well my opinion on it was set as soon as I read the title, so there wasn't much left to do.
Doug posted:why are you using the north as the driving force since they didnt start the american civil war, most northern interests were content to let the south practice slavery and just stop its expansion
swirlsofhistory posted:MadMedico posted:swirlsofhistory posted:
Actually it's racist crap
pls explain.Sympathy for copperheads and draft rioters with a heavy dose of Lincoln was the real racist! apologism.
But besides that, there is nothing historical materialist about trying to shoehorn history into a story about elites versus the people, or powerful classes versus powerless classes. Zinn's A People's History and authors who have contributed to the People's History series share the fixation of the American new left on 'history from below', an approach that is at odds with marxist historical materialism in privileging explanation in terms of identity (including so-called class identity) to the exclusion of a real analysis of the economic basis of social life and how the causes of conflict between classes arise from an incompatibility between the legal superstructure and the economic basis of society. It's instructive in dispelling the myth that history from below is an inherently leftist approrach when consistent application leads to a defense of reactionaries against progressives when the latter have power.
....this isn't true at all?
there definitely is a tendency among some putatively "bottom-up" historians to do that but that's more to do with the conditions of intellectual production those writers are embedded in than anything else.
finally, that kind of historical writing has been instrumental in recovering a properly marxist, anti-universalist approach to history.
jools posted:just because, when you attempt to write from a perspective more informed by the "bottom" than the "top" of society, the picture of progressives becomes more equivocal doesn't mean you evacuate all historical judgement and start favouring reactionaries.
Informed by the ‘bottom’ isn’t a problem on its own as long as we’re referring to the gathering of facts. The problems begin when terms like ‘progressive’ or ‘reactionary’ are taken out of the context of class struggle, their meaning changed to something closer to a connoted identity like ‘victim’ or ‘oppressor’– all while pretending to hold on to their original contextual meaning. Defeated reactionaries in an HM account can become misunderstood progressive radicals under the lens of the non-marxist new left. What looks like historical discovery is really historical re-description – not that that’s necessarily wrong, just that a sympathetic People’s History of the Vendée Uprising isn’t likely to bear much resemblance to any clump of ideals we could easily call leftist.
jools posted:it does mean you stop presenting manichean narratives that bear little relation to what most people experienced though.
So is a non-manichean narrative better? It’s not clear to me why “what most people experienced” or any narrative should be the standard by which we judge historical explanation. No one who died fighting in the Thirty Years War experienced fighting the Thirty Years War, yet the causes (unknown to them) of how they ended up where they did are surely historical.
jools posted:finally, that kind of historical writing has been instrumental in recovering a properly marxist, anti-universalist approach to history.
I doubt it.
swirlsofhistory posted:jools posted:just because, when you attempt to write from a perspective more informed by the "bottom" than the "top" of society, the picture of progressives becomes more equivocal doesn't mean you evacuate all historical judgement and start favouring reactionaries.
Informed by the ‘bottom’ isn’t a problem on its own as long as we’re referring to the gathering of facts. The problems begin when terms like ‘progressive’ or ‘reactionary’ are taken out of the context of class struggle, their meaning changed to something closer to a connoted identity like ‘victim’ or ‘oppressor’– all while pretending to hold on to their original contextual meaning. Defeated reactionaries in an HM account can become misunderstood progressive radicals under the lens of the non-marxist new left. What looks like historical discovery is really historical re-description – not that that’s necessarily wrong, just that a sympathetic People’s History of the Vendée Uprising isn’t likely to bear much resemblance to any clump of ideals we could easily call leftist.
i'm not really that interested in cases like the vendée - and i think you would actually need to engage in a shitload of obfuscation to make a pro-vendée "people's history", at least from the little i know. what i'm inveighing against is the kind of historiography acceptable until really quite recently, where, because of this need to see Progress and Reaction in a universal, transhistorical way, you had historians arguing that eg. the indian rebellion of 1857 was reactionary vs the progressive british empire.
i'm not sure what the point of this distinction between historical re-description and historical discovery is, though, are you saying that history really only does happen at the level of states and statesmen (are you leopold von ranke?).
i find it odd that anyone, marxist or not, could find it reasonable to see the actual experience of historical change as mere ghosts or mirages of the "real" history. none of us will ever be a state or a mode of production, we will only ever be our individual experiences, socialised and enculturated in the totality of all others experience. and the same is even true of great politicians and leaders. this only has anti-marxist consequences if you have a positivistic, static view of social relationships and hierarchies...
jools posted:it does mean you stop presenting manichean narratives that bear little relation to what most people experienced though.
So is a non-manichean narrative better? It’s not clear to me why “what most people experienced” or any narrative should be the standard by which we judge historical explanation. No one who died fighting in the Thirty Years War experienced fighting the Thirty Years War, yet the causes (unknown to them) of how they ended up where they did are surely historical.
how do you judge any historical standard at all then? it's pretty much unjustifiable except through morality and/or aesthetics, and i think the historiography i'm arguing for is the most "moral".
jools posted:finally, that kind of historical writing has been instrumental in recovering a properly marxist, anti-universalist approach to history.
I doubt it.
what has been then?
MadMedico posted:The Cohen brothers went to camp Hertzel, a Zionist camp in Wisconsin.
Leonard has a brother?? Haha lil spelling joke. 
Good posts jools
jools posted:i'm not really that interested in cases like the vendée - and i think you would actually need to engage in a shitload of obfuscation to make a pro-vendée "people's history", at least from the little i know. what i'm inveighing against is the kind of historiography acceptable until really quite recently, where, because of this need to see Progress and Reaction in a universal, transhistorical way, you had historians arguing that eg. the indian rebellion of 1857 was reactionary vs the progressive british empire.
are you seriously suggesting to just plain old ignore right wing populist movements when engaging in "people's history"? because that sounds extremely dumb.
c_man posted:jools posted:i'm not really that interested in cases like the vendée - and i think you would actually need to engage in a shitload of obfuscation to make a pro-vendée "people's history", at least from the little i know. what i'm inveighing against is the kind of historiography acceptable until really quite recently, where, because of this need to see Progress and Reaction in a universal, transhistorical way, you had historians arguing that eg. the indian rebellion of 1857 was reactionary vs the progressive british empire.
are you seriously suggesting to just plain old ignore right wing populist movements when engaging in "people's history"? because that sounds extremely dumb.
no? just that it's easy to imagine a history-from-below of the vendée that still says the republicans were right.
Agnus_Dei posted:how's the dildo thread tonight?
i bought a chinese police nightstick online and i thought it was gonna be cool, imagined myself raining hardwood blows down upon agitprop CIA-funded hippies and enemies of the communist state but then it ended up being hard black rubber and as soon as i opened the box my brother laughed and said it looked like a giant dildo so now it stays in the box with all my other dildos
peepaw posted:mods rename tpaine to david lee roth's millionaire jewish father's zionist cabal
david lee roth ira glass steagall
- i was thinking from the start in terms of having a didactic argument with a hypothetical bourgeois historian and got dragged into basing things on his terms
- HM isn't here to explain every little detail of history ever, if you'd asked me right off if it would be a fool's errand to try and talk about e.g. the Wars of the Roses in such a framework i would have said of course
- it isn't anti-materialist to emphasize the influence of people who truly believed slavery was wrong and the slaves had shitty lives and they needed to be freed regardless of whether they or anyone else was gonna make money through doing so, nor is it necessary to characterize these beliefs as born solely or even mainly of bourgeois self interest
- the civil war wasn't fought between semi-feudalism and industrial capitalism, it was a war fought to preserve one particular brand of capitalism that its practitioners depended on and its antagonists happened to think was morally indefensible. yet it became (potentially) revolutionary in the effects and the opportunities it afforded to the oppressed class, like all moments of inter-bourgeois crisis
- i dont really care about the civil war anymore cos i found out at the weekend that while my wife was at a conference in the states when we having that rough patch last year she got really drunk and made out with some junior professor guy and went back to his room in the dorms and took a massive dump in his bathroom and blocked the toilet and also forgot to wipe her ass and left a shit stain on his bedsheet while he was going down on her and after she was summarily ejected from his room she started banging on the door screaming rape accusations until he let her back in in terror whereupon she demanded he finish the job which he tepidly did, and this is a big problem because now he's on some sort of assessment committee she has to appear in front of oh no
littlegreenpills posted:toronto dubstep scene
NIXON: Jesus Christ.
dank_xiaopeng posted:sometimes i think im the only person on these boards with a stable personal life
you dont know me or most of the people on here
littlegreenpills posted:- i dont really care about the civil war anymore cos i found out at the weekend that while my wife was at a conference in the states when we having that rough patch last year she got really drunk and made out with some junior professor guy and went back to his room in the dorms and took a massive dump in his bathroom and blocked the toilet and also forgot to wipe her ass and left a shit stain on his bedsheet while he was going down on her and after she was summarily ejected from his room she started banging on the door screaming rape accusations until he let her back in in terror whereupon she demanded he finish the job which he tepidly did, and this is a big problem because now he's on some sort of assessment committee she has to appear in front of oh no
Why would she tell you about the shit stain and the rape accusations