As it states on our rules page: /r/Askhistorians is a forum that aims to provide serious, academic-level answers to questions about history. In line with that the mod team understands the core mission of this sub as educational outreach in the historic profession. Our main mission, our sense and purpose, is to provide and curate a space where people who have demonstrable expertise address and answer questions of people who seek knowledge and answers to their historical questions.

Our rules, our system of flairing people, who have shown expertise on a subject, our weekly threads, our podcast, our FAQ, our Books and Resources List, and our twitter feed have all been created and are maintained with the above described mission in mind.

We strive to be transparent and open about why our rules are the way they are and how we enforce them via our frequent Rules Roundtable as well as through posting removal reasons for every question we remove and frequently posting comments that explain why we removed a contribution as well as top level comments in threads where lots of contributions are removed. We frequently conduct a census in which we ask our user base to tell us who they are, their feedback on our moderation and sub culture and what we can do better. We also address every META post about this sub and try to engage the community of over 500.000 subscribers as best and often as possible.

We have an incredibly diverse mod team comprised of 35 moderators, men and women, with a wide range of age, cultural, national, and educational background, and political opinion. Internally, our team is not structured hierarchically but along the principle of "one voice - one vote" in a democratic process.

Additionally, we have a team of over 200 flaired users from an even wider range of backgrounds and political opinions and also many non-flaired contributors with – I image – an equally diverse background.

With all this in mind, the idea that even if us 35 moderators could agree on a political agenda – and one that has such a specific connotation in history as Marxism to boot – and then be able to enforce among such a heterogeneous group of contributors and users borders on the absurd.

The only major consensus in this vast group of moderators, flaired users, non-flaired users, and readers – all in all over half a million people – is that writing, reading, and learning about history is important, it's fun, and it's interesting.

Marxism as an ideology and a political program that aims to abolish the private ownership of the means of production has a specific reading of history – one that is based on an interpretation of history leaning heavily towards a materialistic and economic-based reading of history as well as asserting a specific historical process based on the successions of different regimes of production: From a slave economy, through a feudal economy, to a capitalist economy.

Even if we as the people who run this sub could agree on the above – which we certainly would not be able to –, enforcing this interpretation of history as the only valid one would cost us many treasured contributors and most of our user base – to say nothing about not being in-line with our educational mission that includes providing a diverse pallet of historical interpretations and not limiting it to one that is glorified as the only valid one.

But from experience, it is my very strong suspicion that the people you are talking about – and I'd be really interested in some links to Facebook, which you mentioned – are not talking about Marxism in any classical sense at all. I strongly assume that what they are accusing us of is "cultural Marxism". "Cultural Marxism" – as is explained in-depth in this post as well as this one – is a conspiracy theory developed by William Lind and Pat Buchanan that essentially claims that anything in the humanities that is critical towards currently existing conditions and does not affirm their view of the world is part of an effort of "political correctness" intended to destroy Western civilization as it should be.

Now, the reasons why we are accused of this are manifold:

a.) We as a sub and out community of contributors embrace – as the humanities en large – a wide range of theories and approaches to our subject matter. This includes but is by no means limited to feminist approaches and theories; approaches and theories that study racism and racial inequality; and post-modernist and post-structuralist theories and approaches – all things adherents of the above mentioned CM conspiracy theory claim are specifically intended to destroy Western civilization by spreading "political correctness".

b.) In line with our core mission of education and the spread of historical knowledge, we do not allow and take a stand against racism, sexism, and all other forms of bigotry. Seeing as we are a sub that wants to educate people and promote the spread of academic knowledge, these things have no place here. Seeing as how adherents of the "cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory often fall into these categories, they are not too happy about that.

c.) Also in line with our education mission, we do not allow our sub to be used as a soapbox to spread a political agenda. This has earned us the ire of people ranging from staunch orthodox Stalinists to hardcore Nazis, and also, of course, from adherents of the CM conspiracy since their contributions would fall along this line.

The reasons why this is absurd and blatantly untrue are that none such conspiracy exists (which would be obvious had any adherents of the CM conspiracy even read critical theory); that our whole rule set that is geared towards people having to provide their sources (if asked but better yet, right away), which opens up everything they wrote to public scrutiny (the way every science operates in principle: Give your audience every opportunity to falsify every claim you make by arguing on the base of evidence and referencing said evidence); our transparency in formulating and enforcing these rules; and that even if we wanted, enforcing a coherent political agenda in this sub would be impossible due to the sheer number of people in our team, contributing, and reading.

We are here and do what we do to spread knowledge about history and educate people and attempt to do so in accordance with academic, scientific, and in-depth standards; the notion that is a nefarious agenda aimed at the destruction of Western civilization or anything resembling Marxism in whatever form should strike any person, who's mind has not been filled with lies, as absurd on the face of it.

I think your view is based on a misunderstanding of what 'Marxism' constitutes. It is sometimes used as a synonym for so-called communist ideologies, but at its core it is a theory of history based around economic struggle rather than cultural or political struggle. Marxist history is a perspective. Here's an excerpt from John Arnold's History: A Very Short Introduction which may clear it up a bit:

Marx is remembered chiefly, of course, as a political thinker. But he and his partner Friedrich Engels were also interested in the interpretation of history; in trying to explain how and why changes occur in societies over long periods of time. His influence on historiography has probably been greater than anyone else’s in this century... Practically all historians writing today are marxists (with a small ‘m’).This does not mean that they are all ‘left-wing’ (far from it) or that they necessarily recognize or remember the debt. But one key element of Marx’s thought has become so ingrained in historians’ ideas that it isnow practically taken for granted: the insight that social and economic circumstances affect the ways in which people think about themselves,their lives, the world around them, and thus move to action. This is not to suggest that they are completely controlled by these circumstances.

Bolding mine. This of course assumes that the comments that you are reading do not come from right-wing crackpots who are upset that the sub doesn't validate their pseudohistorical myths.

Arnold, John. 2000. History : A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (accessed February 24, 2017).

To add on to Commie's excellent explanation of the nature of our mod-team and panel, I think it might also be useful to talk about how we use certain theoretical frameworks (of which Marxism is one) in the process of studying and writing history. I will first point you to u/thucydideswasawesome's awesome post on Marxist historiography; they sum this up far better than I can.

I'll give you some time to read that ...

And now that you have, one of the major points that that post makes is that some of Marx' ideas have made it into the study of history such that they're simply a commonplace. For example, the Marxist analysis of class as a driver of history is fairly conventional wisdom at this point, though it can be augmented with other theoretical approaches, or critiqued in multiple ways, or both. It's one of many lenses we can use to approach a problem.

To give you an example of that, let's suppose that I want to know something about sailors in the Age of Sail. There are a few approaches I can take to studying them that might result in different types of books. There's a straight narrative history: this many men were in the navy, they got paid this much, they served for this long, this many died of disease, this many were killed, they got raises in this year. There's a Marxist history: how did sailors understand class, theirs and the "gentlemen" who commanded them? How were boundaries of class fixed or fluid? How did their mutinies and work stoppages affect the "production" of their work; was withholding labor understood as denying the officers and the Admiralty the means of production? There's a gender history: were men at sea all men? How did women affect and abet the Navy, in the work they did ashore or afloat? What was the role of naval wives, inkeepers, prostitutes? There's a queer history: what were, ahem, relations like among sailors? How did sailors understand sexuality and gender? There's an Annales history: how did long-term changes in climate and land, deforestation, etc. affect the Navy in its ability to build ships and control the seas? Any of those lenses provide different results, even from a pretty bare-bones example.

So that's a good way (hopefully) to think about what Marxism is in history -- it's a framework or tool, one of many, that we can use to look at history and to build an analysis on. You don't have to be a Marxist to use Marxism in history.

I do see things on here that would make me understand why one would believe there is evidence of Marxism here

I think some examples of what you and the others you're talking about have seen would clear up some of the confusion that seems inherent in using the term 'M/marxist' in this assumption. I have plenty of guesses as to what some examples would include but I think it would help to get it from the horse's mouth.

As a French Revolutionary focus, Marxism was (and to some still is) a major lens for viewing the French Revolution. However it fell out of favor by the 30s and TO this day the specter of Marxism still hangs over it even though it's becoming clear that there is no single theoricial lens the French Revolution can easily be viewed in.

As such, I personally haven't seen anything in respect to Marxist ideology, especially being so exposed from older historical sources. And just as /u/commiespaceinvader mentioned, the diversity of our flairs is what makes AH strong. However I feel that Marxist theory is minimal in our interpretations but still present in our sources at times, if that makes sense.

Because a 'marxist', for lack of a better word, worldview has pervaded into almost every university discipline over the past 40 years - a 'social justice' bent in many cases

Does this mean if I say "What caused the Opium Wars in China?" that every explanation is a biased political shill -- of course not -- history is fantastic

History is taught and interpreted in different ways, and the way it is presented and analyzed has changed many times over the years -- everything is a choice, there is no true 'non-bias' in the way much of history is discussed, similar to how/why Journalists choose to report on certain stories or not -- unless you are talking a fact such as what date did JFK die, etc -- and Politics/Philosophy/Economics/Morals/Pop Culture and other things are part of how History is analyzed and discussed

For example, I might say that the 5 most important American events in the past 100 years are WW2, the Internet, 9/11, the Great Depression and the Cold War -- someone else might focus on Civil Rights, the Labor Movement, the election of Obama, the Moon Landing, Women's Suffrage, etc -- there is only so much time to teach or research about certain things, choices have to be made