How Marxists View the Middle Ages
Class societies didn’t begin with capitalism: the ancient and medieval worlds had their own systems of exploitation. Marxist historians have set out to explain how those systems worked — and what their eventual demise tells us about what might lie ahead.
Woodcut on enamel depicting agricultural work, ca. 1160. (DEA / G. Dagli Orti / De Agostini via Getty Images)
As students of history, Karl Marx and those who followed in his wake primarily concerned themselves with the rise of capitalism, its spread throughout the world, and the ways in which it might be ended. But they also tried to explain the development of pre-capitalist societies in the light of Marx’s historical materialism and its basic concepts. In doing so, they hoped to identify the conditions that enabled class societies to take shape before their inner contradictions precipitated their collapse.
The framework those scholars developed was highly influential and stimulated important historical research, but it contained some fundamental flaws. In recent decades, historians working in the Marxist tradition have identified those flaws and proposed alternative ways of understanding the ancient and medieval worlds.
Their creative revisions of Marxist theory have made it possible to look at these fascinating historical periods on their own terms, instead of presenting them as mere antechambers to the rise of capitalism. The latter approach had the paradoxical effect, for Marxists, of making it seem as if capitalism was a natural phase of social development.
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