I'm reading Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror," which is a work of popular history about the 14th century in Western Europe and kind of accidentally or unconsciously Marxist. It's supposed to be the story of the 14th century as told through the eyes of this powerful French nobleman named Enguerrand de Coucy, but 200 pages in and there's barely any information about him. Instead, Tuchman focuses on economics, history, and virtually every aspect of daily life, showing how European feudalism at the time was collapsing into capitalism and basically unable to contend with its own contradictions—much like capitalism today. In particular, the plague and the Hundred Years' War decimated France, then the richest and most powerful region in Europe.
It goes extremely well with another excellent and much more blatantly Marxist book on this subject, "Caliban and the Witch." Several times Tuchman mentions, in particular, the practice of the 14th century bourgeoisie buying their way into the ranks of the nobility (something I remember Honore de Balzac was obsessed with even in the 19th century), which shows that yes, capitalism overthrew feudalism (in the French Revolution, for instance), but also gradually developed from it and even blended together with it also. A book like "A People's History of the World," also very good (although written by a Trotskyist), tries to square this circle essentially by saying that the process of extracting significant amounts of surplus labor more or less began during the Neolithic period.
These books jibe with my own thesis that the further back in history you go, the more Marxist even popular books of history become. When you dispense with the ridiculous great man theory of history, that basically leaves you with two options: historical materialism, or weird Nazi mysticism—nothing has changed, everything has always been the same, ideas like liberty have guided the human spirit since the Big Bang, etcetera.
I'm reading Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror," which is a work of popular history about the 14th century in Western Europe and kind of accidentally or unconsciously Marxist. It's supposed to be the story of the 14th century as told through the eyes of this powerful French nobleman named Enguerrand de Coucy, but 200 pages in and there's barely any information about him. Instead, Tuchman focuses on economics, history, and virtually every aspect of daily life, showing how European feudalism at the time was collapsing into capitalism and basically unable to contend with its own contradictions—much like capitalism today. In particular, the plague and the Hundred Years' War decimated France, then the richest and most powerful region in Europe.
It goes extremely well with another excellent and much more blatantly Marxist book on this subject, "Caliban and the Witch." Several times Tuchman mentions, in particular, the practice of the 14th century bourgeoisie buying their way into the ranks of the nobility (something I remember Honore de Balzac was obsessed with even in the 19th century), which shows that yes, capitalism overthrew feudalism (in the French Revolution, for instance), but also gradually developed from it and even blended together with it also. A book like "A People's History of the World," also very good (although written by a Trotskyist), tries to square this circle essentially by saying that the process of extracting significant amounts of surplus labor more or less began during the Neolithic period.
These books jibe with my own thesis that the further back in history you go, the more Marxist even popular books of history become. When you dispense with the ridiculous great man theory of history, that basically leaves you with two options: historical materialism, or weird Nazi mysticism—nothing has changed, everything has always been the same, ideas like liberty have guided the human spirit since the Big Bang, etcetera.