JG: Would you be happy to be described as a “Marxist historian” or is there a more accurate term for historians like you, Howard Zinn and others?

EF (Eric Foner is reputed to be a “noted Marxist historian,”): I tend to eschew labels. Marx is believed to have said: “I am not a Marxist.” In other words: “I don’t want to be assigned to a single school of interpretation.” But no-one can understand history who does not have at least some familiarity with the writings of Marx. I have been powerfully influenced by Marxist insights, especially those of the last generation of British Marxist scholars such as Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson and others. But I have also been influenced by black radical scholars like WEB Du Bois, who himself was influenced by Marxism and also by other radical traditions and by feminist scholars.

Mises further explains: Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is human will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego’s meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life.

Mises highlights the importance of the human will and human agency in making choices: For the term will means nothing else than man’s faculty to choose between different states of affairs, to prefer one, to set aside the other, and to behave according to the decision made in aiming at the chosen state and forsaking the other.

In “Why America Has Never Been Great for Black People” Ariana Doss writes that: Our president’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” has always confused me. As a progressive person, who only views the past to find ways to improve the future, I cannot fathom why President Trump wants to go backwards. When I examine this country’s history, I do not find a time in which I, or any other Black person for this matter, would have wanted to go.

As Mises explains: Marxism asserts that a man’s thinking is determined by his class affiliation. Every social class has a logic of its own. The product of thought cannot be anything else than an “ideological disguise” of the selfish class interests of the thinker.

Many champions of the instinct school are convinced that they have proved that action is not determined by reason, but stems from the profound depths of innate forces, impulses, instincts, and dispositions which are not open to any rational elucidation.