It’s so frustrating. And if you do get the chance to reply, you just get another move from the playbook. While they’re telling you to read history, does it ever cross their mind to read Marx et al?

It would be too much effort, for the most part, to explain what’s wrong with the instruction, ‘read history’. Lenin covers it really well in the first para of ‘The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism’, but will these people read Lenin? And still, we’re the ignorant ones.

Edit: the paragraph in question (which is actually the first two paragraphs, sorry):

Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect”. And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.

But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling “sectarianism” in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.