Thread on alternatives to historical materialism in r/askhistorians

I wish everyone in that thread a big

The OP is transparently there to start an argument. They have mostly good points, but that's always a dicey means of communicating and it's going to fall flat (as it did) if you take it to a niche community that doesn't have a real fault line on the matter. OP is going to a small circle of history students, history academics, and dudes who watch 20-hour videos on Rome and asking "why aren't you idiots Marxists?" -- no shit there is no worthwhile response.

Of course the comments are obnoxious, and you also have mods in there doing the classic "we don't want to talk about this so we're going to call you uncivil for disagreeing" bit. A disaster of a thread all around.

We might use evidence but we distrust grand theories

Unless of course it's anti-sovietism, neoclassialism, some half garbled form of zombie Keynesianism and of course the guiding star; white identitarianism

Then we reecive the blessing of all-mighty culture (i.e. god)

Permanently Deleted

i've never seen someone so pressed about intersectional theory. the AH people made a misstep in not identifying their practice as such but it's pretty damn obvious.

they also misidentify why history isn't science: because it's literature and interpretation. it is not a science in which evidence cannot compel a conclusion, identifying the constant relitigation of history as a scientific process embarrasses the historian's writing talent and expects there to be an attainable truth at the end of the process.

I'm getting a Master's in history and I have no desire to read all that.

Oof I hate their need to pad word count. So much of that part 1/2 guy's response could have been omitted. Also the down votes, hoes mad.

This is a bit outside my experience with academic historians although the ones I run with are of a certain stripe. Then again I am not in a disciplinary feild like history and tend to disregard when my historian friends assert diciplinarity boundaries and norms because it feels like putting on a straight jacket that won't help me with my work as a grad.

I mean historical materialism has already been expanded to the idea of the school of global historical materialism by neo Marxists, who continue on from Marx like Samir Amin, if that's what OP is looking into

In this reconstruction, the importance of developing an analysis of culture and its function in historical development is equaled only by the difficulty of the task. Its importance derives from the fact that the dominant bourgeois mainstream in the social sciences was initially founded on an overdy culturalist philosophy of history, and then, when this philosophy gradually lost its strength of conviction, took refuge in agnosticism, refusing any search for the general beyond the specific and, thus, remaining under the spell of culturalism. Vulgar Marxist theories are not fundamentally different. The thesis of the so called two roads tries unsuccessfully to reconcile the concepts of historical materialism with Eurocentric prejudice about the exceptional nature of European history; while the thesis of the "five stages" avoids the difficulty by minimizing specific traits to the point of artificially reducing the diversity of different historical paths to the mechanical repetition of the European schema.

The reconstruction of social theory along truly universalist lines must have as its base a theory of actually existing capitalism, centered on the principal contradiction generated by the worldwide expansion of this system.
This contradiction could be defined in the following way: the integration of all of the societies of our planet into the world capitalist system has created the objective conditions for universalization. However, the tendency toward homogenization, produced by the universalizing force of the ideology of commodities, that underlies capitalist development is hindered by the very conditions of unequal accumulation. The material base of the tendency toward homogenization is the continuous extension of markets, in breadth as well as in depth. The commodity and capital markets gradually extend to the entire world and progressively take hold of all aspects of social life. The labor force, at first limited in its migrations by different social, linguistic, and legal handicaps, tends to acquire international mobility.

No Reddit for me please, I'm trying to quit...

Anytime anyone tries to describe another field of study as a 'science' I want to bash my head in and then do theirs for good measure.

We can't even decide what makes science 'science'.

Marie-Madeleine Davy would very proud of this discussion

you're not arguing for grand theories right?