History

i'm not much of a marxist so this is where i cop out

i'm sure there is something interesting about history and marx in general

there are only laws of history with hindsight.

those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

thats my paradoxical (i mean dialectical ) philosophy of history

tbh, my post was a joke. i don't feel a need for any particular philosophy of history. I mean its useful to know what stuff happened in given circumstances, so we can draw lessons for situations we face. I mean stuff like saying 'history is the history of class struggle' is always an over simplification.

Well firstly, we need to understand history if we are to even draw a line between feudalism and capitalism, so clearly it is important to have some grasp. The very fact that you can seperate feudalism and capitalism implies that some knowledge or concept of feudalism.

Secondly Marx said alot of theings, but the thing about the inevitability of communism was a statement more of propaganda vlaue. Like how someone at a strike can say "Have no doubt, we will win!". There are vast tracts of Marx that completely contradict such crude determinism, and infact hsi whole argument with Hegel was that humanity itself made history, that the dialectic was not a closed circuit aimed towards reconciliation but rather an open ended one, that could never grasp it's own tail, that their could be no synthesis, this is why marx talked about the negation of the negation.

three texts suggest themselves as possibly being relevant in the context of this debate:

Alan Carter: Marx: A Radical Critique (Boulder: Westview Press / Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1988)
see his home page:
http://spot.colorado.edu/~cartera/carter.html

G.A. Cohen "Karl Marx's Theory of History: A defence"
brief summary here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Cohen

Cornelius Castoriadis "History and Revolution"

For those seeking other marxist perpsectives on "history" - and there are whole journals associated with it yuo might also like to enquire within:

E.P. Thompson "The Poverty of Theory and other essays". merlin, 1978

Raphael Samuel (ed) "People's History and Socialist Theory" RKP, 1981

Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones "Culture, ideology and Politics" RKP, 1982.

the last two are part of the History Workshop series. I've not seen recent issues of the Journal but certainly late 70's early 80s there was a lot of theorising around marxist interpretations of "history".

on a different tip again you may find Mark poster's "Foucault, Marxism and History" to be of interest:

http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/books/

(the complete text is online)

Lem i'm not following, the concept of a philosophy of history is to try and understand how things developed and where they might be heading.

I think you'll be in a bit of a pickle writing an essay on Heideggerian conceptions of history, unless you have a huge body of knowledge and an angle.

I think Heidegger never really put forward a conceptual model of history in the way that someone like Marx did. The trendy reading of Time and Being is to basically make him a proto Sartre or Camus. Examining a highly individualized Dasein as it struggles to make sense of existentialist angst, but that's a wee bit revisionist because the Dasein is very much linked to the community, to the volk, something obvious in his reactionary critique of liberalism and a history that focus's on such petty trivial matters as "peasants wars" and "natural history". For Heidegger, the class war, and everyday life was unauthentic, not real history. Real history only begins when these unauthentic pseudo histories (histories of unauthentic dasein) are superceded by a real Existenz.

Unlike Marx who thought that to get to this authentic "ezistenz" (or communism in his lingo) the class struggle had to be seen through and that real ezistenz can only come about through this struggle of the working class. Heidegger saw fascism as an authentic force, a real historical force that would wipe out the mailaise of "nihilism" that had affected liberal capitalism. Class is an inauthentic form of Dasein, whilst the "German nation" with it's historical mission is an authentic one.

Just out of interest why the fuck would you want to write an essay on that Nazi fuck wit anyway?

Actually you should write and essay on Heidegger and Marx, the commonality of "labour" as what seperates humans from the rest of nature, from objects and then examine how Heidegger ended up proclaiming "Arbeit mach frei" and Marx ends up seeking the abolishment of work.

Here's an interesting quote to start you.

Cantdocartwheels: all disciplines are based on half truths, subjectivity and bizarre attempts at narratives. It is how we try to build more useful models of reality through the use of a discipline that is important; that is the key to the philosophy of history or indeed of any field of research.

Generally: Marx produced a structural description of history that has hampered clear thinking on the part of generations of his followers ever since. You don't anymore need Marx to have good radical history, in other words to appreciate that by understanding one event or series of events you might just discover some underlying phenomenon that can be of use generally to enhance our historical understanding.

I don't believe that by modern standards Marx was a good historian. He was a highly educated and knowledgeable man but he created this creaking structural view of history that on closer examination is at best a crude representation of social and economic development; at worst it is tendentious guesswork motivated by a desire to serve an over-arching theory. It's outdated and pretty much useless except as a piece of evidence in itself; the attempts by Marx's followers to reinject some utility into the old fucker's theories have done little more than balance increasingly precarious ornamentation on a seriously unstable structure.

By the way CdoCW a shovel is not a spade and to use the word to mean a spade would just be completely wrong; these two tools are different shapes and designed to do different things. Only in Devon might you find that some confusion exists because a so-called "devon spade" is actually a long handled shovel.