I have complained about it before but I heard on of the guests from guerrilla history on the deprogram make this argument and it made me want to gouge my eyes out. This kind of trans historical argumentation is both stupid and unmarxist, just stop! Sorry I felt the need to vent.
These states were not imperialist and they weren’t settler colonies. This framing doesn’t make any fucking sense when transfered to a medieval context. Like the best you could say is that the Italian city states represented an early firm of merchant capital, but even then that is an incredibly complex phenomenon that has only a tenuous connection to modern capitalism. Calling these city states early capitalism is just a fancy way of saying “lol u hate capitalism yet you exchange good or service! Curious!”
Seriously just stop. I don’t know why this set me off but it was like a week ago and I am still mad about it.
I stopped listening to the “Revolutions” podcast 100 episodes in when during a Q&A the host (Mike Duncan I believe his name is) said in response to a question about his politics that he doesn’t subscribe to Marxist interpretation of history. I have no idea why that statement, which I already knew to be the case (from the way he covered history and spoke of figures like Lafayette, the king(s) of England, etc.) set me off, but it did. It’s unrealistic for me to expect every historian to view things in a Marxist way. Almost all of them are liberals whether because of the convictions or self preservation.
Well anyway, I can identify with and share this irrational reaction to podcast shit.
I like Mike Duncan but yeah he can be a bit silly. From his own definition of marxism he really doesn’t understand what it is let alone how dialectical materialism works. Interestingly enough he does seem to have an instinctual grasp of how a marxist would more formally analyze history, which maybe is why I have always liked him. The fact that heist conscious of what he is doing though leads to some incredibly painfully lib takes.
I completely stopped watching the most left wing satire show in German TV, Die Anstalt, because they brought up “forced expropriations” under Stalin when covering the Ukraine War. My brothers in Christ, have you ever seen a “voluntary expropriation”*? You arseholes argued for the expropriation of Deutsche Wohnen etc. before, do you think they’ll just hand over 100,000 apartments because you asked nicely? It’s good expropriation when we do it but “forced expropriations” when they do it. There was other fuck ups in terms of bad historiography (like categorising the “holodomor” as a genocide even if the source they listed literally contradicts that classification) but not understanding your own ideology to such a degree is just irredeemable to me.
*Fidel doesn’t count, he’s different.
Yeah for some reason it bugs me more when an amateur like Mike goes out of their way to say they don’t subscribe to Marx versus an actual pro like Sheila Fitzpatrick (the later, though she is explicitly not a Marxist historian has done a lot of good Soviet history and was a pioneer in explicitly saying it’s ridiculous to compare Nazi Germany and the USSR, like how so many of her contemporaries wanted to do).