a marxist history of the world- counterfire

Some fun may be had with the latest installment of this series on counterfuck website.
Niel Faulkner has written an 'interesting' account of ww2 which was, apparently, an entirely imperialist conflict, which was marked by horrific massacres by the western powers and soviet union, while the Germans were simply attempting to regain a fair division of imperialist spoils. No holocaust, no death camps, no mass slaughter of Jews, slavs, gypsies, homosexuals etc. No mass terror of civilian populations ( except by the allies).
There is a comments box, can anyone get something past the clusterfuck moderators?

I followed the series up to about The End of Rome in the west but got so frustrated at it that i had to leave it. Will check the latest one out.

Oi barney-pig

why not republish it as a blog with annotations. You could call it something like the trotskyist school of falsification

Ah the "fascism is no worse than other types of capitalism" school of thought ...

Here is the piece.

Ok, first thing:

Germany had never had a position of european dominance to restore.

Wow there's actually no mention of the holocaust or anything like that at all.

I was so pissed off I forgot to post the link. It reaaly is dire.

There's nothing about what the Japanese were doing in Korea as well.

Mentions the Bengal famine though. Odd,

It's the sort of piece that got that nice Mr Irving into so much trouble.

Htf can you miss out the holocaust? Even if it was incidental to the aims of the Nazis during the war (i'd argue that it wasn't, at least in the latter stages of the war) it was still a pretty central part of what happened in WWII.

I seem to remember reading the German economy being the most industrialised in Europe, perhaps that's what he was referring to?

Evwen if so it's still a bit of a stretch to saying it had a position of European dominance.

It wasn't though. It's a commonplace that has been trotted out in shoddy historiess like this for years . Adam Tooze destroys this myth in The Wages of Destruction that shows beyond a shadow of doubt that Germany was pretty much the modern day equivalent of a state like India.

How does that explain the position of the SPD then given it was based on a heavily industrialised working class?!

It wasn't - it was heavily based in the industrial areas and electorate. Which wasn't actually that widespread as the myth has it. The bulk of other production and support came from small scale manufacturies with a handful of people employed in them - and those people being paid peanuts and working on outdated machinery (i.e extensive exploitation rather than the true mark of capital, intensive exploitation). The idea of Germany as an industrial behemoth comes from the post-war years, not from the reality of germany in those years.

I know it was 'centred' in the Ruhr/Westphalia areas but it was the largest party-votes wise-just before WW1... Might be worth having a better look at, i'll have a look I think.

It sure was, but one of the way the myth got wheel was by equating an SPD vote/voter with industrial worker. They dominated that small section of the population but it remained a small section of the population. Traditional artisan stuff or classic peasantry was the order of the day.

I suspect the author is mistaking the speed of economic effect of German industrialisation for the volume of it. Also, Germany only patchily industrialised, mostly on it's western flank and spottily on it's eastern flank.

Not even in any of the raw materials it produced.

With almost as shoddy a system of land inheritance, too, which didn't help the economy or productivity.

Yep. Berlin, for example, was massively productive between the wars, but more than half of that came from "cottage production" of the watchmaker type.

The entire article was only 1400 words long, so it was never going to be any good.

I don't really see what made it a "Marxist history", the only bit of it which was arguably Marxist was the final paragraph:

And this rests on the 'state capitalist' thesis.

Not to defend the article in general, but I'd say that it was fairly dominant in the years immediately following the Franco-Prussian war, at least in a military sense.

It was among the leading powers but it wasn't ever really dominant apart from a short period following victory in the Franco-Prussian war - and even militarily this was only in a limited sense, bolstered by (or more accurately, circumscribed by) GB's reluctance to get involved on the continent following the Crimean war - militarily they were totally hemmed in by and at the mercy of the British Navy and Empire. Industrially they were a relative backwater - which makes the claim that Faulkner (who i have a lot of time for generally) rests his shoddy argument of European dominance on ("Germany was not backward at all: it was the greatest industrial power in Europe.") even more shaky. They were going to war precisely because of their lack of dominance.

I'm certainly no expert on the economic history of Germany, and I haven't actually read the Wages of Destruction, so I'm reluctant to start pulling opinions about it out of my arse.

Perhaps he meant the Holy Roman Empire? That was top dog for a few centuries IIRC.

I haven't read the article, and I'm sure your rendition of it is somewhat cartoonesque, but it sounds like a pretty reasonable analysis to me. Is there a better 1400 word analysis you have in mind?

PS I quite liked his stuff in the past on the fall of the Roman Empire. So, I may be biased.. lol

If only some of the other posters on here heeded that advice.

Did he say that? he must have changed his views a lot then.

nah he didn't say that at all, i said that before I'd read the article. but it's a kind of "marxism" i've come across before, mostly on revleft lol