Pick an Event in History - the Destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, in 70 CE. The Romans sacked the place, burned it down and over the next 60 years or so, caused the Jewish people much anguish by expelling the people from the land, building an idol on the Temple Mount, plowing it over and together with famine and disease, and completely decimating the country, the people were expunged and subjugated.
Marxists tend to project their view of history onto events that have little to do with a class conflict. They will explain the history as follows: The reason the Jews were expelled, is because the Jews represented the workers, and the Romans represented Capitalist forces, and due to the lack of organization, and the lack of development of a proper bourgeoisie to turn the Capitalists into reformers, the Romans conquered and wiped out the workers.
Or perhaps we can explain that there were no workers or Capitalists, but simply a standard slave-owner society, where the slaves were becoming too quarrelsome, and the Romans represent the owners of that society, and were simply quelling resistance, and were oppressing the meek on the basis of the slave-owner model.
Marxists especially tend to do this to history and this is why I used them as an example. They tend to take preconceived notions about a particular historical approach, and apply it as the actual feelings, sentiments and thoughts about the people concerned as explanations for why they rebelled, and why history presented itself in that manner.
This is the historical fallacy, and it applies generally all over. Yes, Marxists have a right to explain the forces inherent in society as part of their view of explaining history, but Marxists tend to apply those explanations to the people on the ground, they explain that what was going on in the heads of these people was a market-bourgeoisie framework or a super-structure model and they wanted out...and so the bourgeoisie re-structured and focused themselves....etc... which is simply wrong. Only post-Communism can you apply this approach to modern views. For example - you can say that about the movement in Sweden to Socialist principles - because indeed, those bourgeoisie elements in society are in fact impacted by the theories of Marxists.
However, to super impose our definitions of history, our definitions of culture, our understanding of class-conflict and to inflict people with our understanding of it in our terms on a time and location that doesn't have those definitions, those understandings those conflicts of interest is about as ridiculous as the above example illustrates.
We must be extremely careful about imposing our views and paradigms on people and locations other than our own, in our own times. Its about knowing our paradigms and how that impacts on our perception of history in general.
