All academic historians today are Marxist historians.
This might seem like hyperbole. In fact, it is. It would be more accurate to say, “nearly all historians today are Marxist historians.” There. Now, the hyperbole is gone.
What do I mean by this? Isn’t this simply a right-wing talking point, a boogeyman, a distraction from the “real issues?”
No. It is not, in fact, I would argue that this lies at the heart of the “real issues.”
Noticeably in the past few weeks, let alone the past few years, we have seen a rise in people at all levels of academia sign statements and raise their voices on the topic of Israel. Very few of those members of academia know much of anything about Israel. But what they do know about is how to interpret events through a Marxist framework. And as the German-Jewish postwar philosopher Hannah Arendt says - though I am paraphrasing - that way lies danger. When historians focus more on inserting events into a preexisting framework rather than using their own faculties of judgment to analyze events, we are no longer investigating the past or current events, we are creating ideology.
I am not trying to use “Marxist” as a slur. I am trying to be factual. For many millenials in college studying all things “theory” prior to the 2008 recession, Marx made a lasting impact. For myself, reading Marx in college felt revelatory, but not dogmatic. He was part of my interest in thinkers, in viewing the world through novel lenses. But like so many others, his perspective felt so “correct,” and we read so little counterpoint to his main areas of appeal, that many Marxist theories simply remained as common sense truths in the back of our minds, only emerging as dogma after the Great Recession. For many humanities academics, they have never questioned whether Marxian analysis should remain on the mantle of unquestionable common sense.
Why Marx?
The appeal of Marx was simple: he both provided a relatable account of human nature and a persuasive lens through which to analyze history.
In his early works, Marx proposed that the modern world alienated us of our essential humanity. We are a species of creativity, and when we work without autonomy or ownership over the final product, we are painfully “alienated” from the products of our labor. We only produce one small part of the pin at the factory, never the whole pin. When humans become yet another tool on the assembly line, like a hammer, we are no longer the craftsmen. We are cogs. It is easy to see the appeal this holds in our era of ever-growing bureaucratic strangleholds over workers’ and students’ autonomy.
The second part of the simple appeal of Marx was his explanation of history. According to Marx, the “arc” of history is not the product of individual “Great Men,” not the momentous decisions of kings and inventors. Instead, Marx posits that the arc of history is the arc of class struggle. History is comprised of one disadvantaged group who is materially suffering rising up against those wielding power and holding more of the material resources. This leads to some new status quo, which again gives rise to struggle, and so on, until its eventual resolution via the worldwide spread of industrialization, and then, the economic leveling that leads to the polity of communism.
It is no secret that society has suffered since the time I was in college. The Great Recession is one that many millenials never recovered from, Covid has upended the early lives of many emerging members of Gen-Z, and political, economic, and social disorder remains rampant. The simplicity of the Marxist explanatory myth is intoxicating.
Historians today do not always embrace the materialist elements of Marxism, but they almost always embrace the analysis of history vis-a-via struggle between the oppressor and oppressed. Some view this struggle through gender, some through race, some through colonialism, some through economic class, and some through nearly any other marker of identity. Most historians combine some form of all of them, to some degree or another. The ideology of power struggle between classes or identities has becoming overwhelmingly the dominate lens through which historians tell tales of the past. In fact, I believe many graduate students and professors would struggle to frame their research using any other lens; they would be lost without Marxist analysis. Not only would they be lost without it, they would claim it would be wrong to introduce a different conceptual frame.
The University as Factory
A simple answer as to how humanities departments underwent ideological capture is simply through the mundanity of departmental politics and personal preferences in graduate admissions and faculty hiring. When departments and faculty advisors are choosing who to accept from graduate school applicants, they are looking for research proposals that align with their own areas of knowledge. This seems innocuous in itself - of course an advisor would only wish to advise in their area of expertise. But what happens when an area of expertise becomes not a time period, not a series of events, but the theory being used to analyze those events? And when departments are looking to hire new faculty members, who is it doing the hiring? The very same faculty choosing the graduate students, except now, they wish for colleagues that share their values as well. This leads to the overproduction of research using the same ideological lens, and a hiring market that incentivizes toeing the ideological line from the very onset of one’s career.
The result of this is, unfortunately, that humanities academia has become a factory for the manufacturing and dissemination of ideology. Humanities, and as I understand it, many social sciences departments, have counterintuitively become the very factory that Marx railed against. Yes, history graduate students do peruse archives, read from other historians, cite their sources, and so on. But rarely is this done to unearth new information for that information’s own sake. This is done to write a story crafted to fit a specific worldview, and in today’s academic institutions, it is generally a Marxist worldview.
The graduate student has, ironically, become the factory worker for academic departments’ ideological assembly line. Archives and past academic literature has become the raw material that the worker - the graduate student - assembles into its final form: another ideological “proof,” another affirmation that, yes, reality aligns with this mode of ideological analysis. The graduate student worker, under the managerial supervision of the professor, assembles the archival raw material to fit the factory’s final production goals: more publications to make unassailable a Marxist theory of history, to cement it as a common sense analysis, if not the only analysis. The most productive assembly line workers - that is, the most productive graduate students - are then hired by yet another factory and given a promotion to the position of manager - that is, they become the professor.
Of course, there is no product without a consumer market, and the largest demographic of the consumer market is the undergraduate. Now, the newly-minted professor has at least two implicit responsibilities: like other managers, they must still produce higher-order work product while overseeing their workers in creating more minute aspects of the final product. But they are also a salesperson, selling ideology to the undergraduate. Unlike other salespeople, their job is made easier by having a captive market, and they can also function as disciplinarians, rewarding or punishing ideological conformity according to their own discretion. Of course, they will not admit to doing so, and they probably do not believe they are doing so, as many see themselves as simply arbiters of truth.
Arendt’s Warning
Decades ago, Hannah Arendt was already well critical of this turn in academia. To her, a Hegelian or Marxist approach to history was akin to ascribing a telos to history, an arc of inevitability and progress. In Arendt’s Life of the Mind, she decries when one attributes “semi-divinity” to history, as she sees is the goal of the Marxist historian. Marxist history is dangerous to Arendt since it cuts off the autonomy of the historian, the historian’s faculty of judgment in analyzing events as they occur. Instead, it turns the historian’s role of unearthing and analyzing events into the role in supporting ideology.
Worse, to Arendt, viewing history as an inevitable march towards an end goal whereby the causes are either “natural,” such as the race-based analyses of history prominent under early 20th-century Pan-Germanism, or “material,” such as based in class under Bolshevism, is one small but necessary component behind the rise of totalitarianism. Marxist interpretations of history were not enough on their own to give rise to totalitarianism, but to Arendt, the Marxist or other ideological “Explanations of Everything” were a crucial lifeline, an invigorating and mobilizing message. To the upset masses of the early 20th-century looking for an explanation of their loss of status, loss of order, and loss of finances, a totalizing ideology, including and especially for its use in historical analyses, not only allowed them to explain reality, but to shape reality. Totalizing ideologies became the driving point behind people’s engagement with reality, and ideology was not upheld by any one figure but reproduced and distributed through institutions, including the media and academia. It does not take much to see the parallels today.
Israel and the University-as-Factory
I now think of this often when I see academics I know or academics in the news mimicking one another’s speech and language on Israel. They mimic each other’s hatred for Israel, they mimic talking points on Palestine and Israel, they reaffirm each other’s zealotry and convictions. But very few of them have anything remotely approximating in-depth knowledge about Israel, let alone the surrounding regions in relationship to the Israeli conflict. One might attribute this to simple hubris: they think that due to their advanced degrees and the constant reaffirmation for their intellects that they have received most of their lives, they are blind to what they do not know, and presume that they simply know more than others by nature of who they are and their status. Or, one might attribute this to professional politics - to the desire to network, to stay in professional good graces, to get good reviews from students, and to simply accrue social points.
But I think there is a deeper element to the academic’s tendency to speak with such vitriol combined with ignorance on the topic of Israel: it is endemic to modern humanities academia. The content being analyzed no longer matters, what matters is the lens, the ideology. It is not that professors, graduate students, and undergraduate students are speaking on topics that they do not know about, they are speaking on what they do know about: Marxist and identitarian analysis. If other colleagues have already neatly placed a set of material conditions into the Marxist algorithm, and the oppressor-oppressed binary outputs Israel as the villain, then that is enough confirmation for them to speak confidently and zealously. As Arendt warned, when historians get hijacked by ideology, the content suffers while the ideology grows, and the ideology is given a god-like status.
The rise of student groups with no specific knowledge signing declarations condemning Israel, of professors with only the most tangential relationship to the topic signing documents condemning Israel, of brazen social media posts supporting Hamas, and so forth, belies a distortion in the heart of academia. Academia has moved away from the intellectual enterprise of unearthing and debating knowledge, to the productive enterprise of transforming archives and recycling prior scholarship into an abundance of ideological consumer goods.
When all you have is a hammer...
I would say a lot of it is Marxian rather than Marxist. Particularly when class is dropped or substantially superseded as an analytical framing.
I suspect an adverse reaction to Marx may also act as something of a negative selection mechanism.