Marxism and the Middle Ages
Stephen Rigby argues that Marxist analysis has had an underrated role in the social and economic interpretation of the medieval world.
Of Marx's intellectual legacy, his politics, based on the conception of the proletariat as a revolutionary class, now seems mere wishful thinking; his economics, premised on the labour theory of value, is rejected by all but a handful of fundamentalists; his philosophy of dialectical materialism is merely an intellectual museum-piece. What remains of interest from Marx and Engels' work is their social and historical theory: historical materialism. Marx may have wanted to change the world, rather than simply to interpret it in a new way but, in practice, Marxism has actually been rather more successful at comprehending the world than at trans- forming it. Marx deserves more to he remembered for his social science than for his scientific socialism.
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