The term “historical materialism” refers to a methodology for studying history, economics and society. Its first expression came from Karl Marx, who presented it as the materialist conception of history. This theory seeks to explain changes in productive capacity and technology on the basis of the organization of economy and society as a whole. The theory focuses on the means that humans use to generate the necessities of existence. The relationships among the social classes, the political structures at work in a society, and the general ideologies at play all are part of the consideration. Since the time of Marx, myriads of Marxist thinkers have expanded and augmented this theory, and today it has many variants, some Marxist and others non-Marxist.
The fundamental reality that serves as the basis for historical materialism is that humans must produce and then reproduce the material necessities of life in order to survive from one generation to the next. Marx took this premise further by claiming the importance of the requirement for social relations to exist for exchange and production to take place. The most basic of these social relations is “production relations.”
With this said, production does not take place in a vacuum, and the relationships that form to facilitate production do not grow at random. While human beings all perform work on nature, they do not perform identical tasks. Some people manufacture cars, while others work on the oil wells that ultimately fuel those cars. This means that effective societies require a division of labor. This gives different people different jobs; according to Marxist thought, this also means that some people exist off the fruits of the work of others by owning the means by which production takes place. How this ownership takes place depends on the sort of society in which they live. Production occurs through a very specific set of relations among different groups of people. These production relations depend on the character and level of productive forces at work at any point in history. As Marx saw it, productive forces include tools, technology, instruments, raw materials, land, as well as human abilities and knowledge.
When writers discuss historical materialism, they generally argue that society has passed through a variety of production modes or types. That is to say, these production relations take on the character of their productive forces. In ancient times, these consisted of the simple instruments and tools of the time. In modern times, these consist of technology and machinery. The main production modes that Marx identified have ranged between tribal society, or primitive communism, and more advanced forms, such as feudalism and capitalism. As each new social paradigm takes hold, people interact with each other and the natural world in different ways, meaning that the methods of production also change. When production yields a surplus, distribution takes place in different ways. In ancient societies, a class of slave owners dominated the slave class. Feudalism’s basis was the relationship between landowners and serfs. Capitalism relies on the itneraction between the owner (capitalist) class and the workers. The capitalists own all of the means of producing, distributing and exchanging goods, while the workers exchange their work for the money to buy those products.
No matter what the particular production methodology is, according to Marx, the production relations of a society form that society’s economic base. From that base arise laws, political institutions, culture, customs, ethics and morality. This means that a society’s economic structure produces all of its other institutions. These pillars form the ideological superstructure of a society, and they match the character of that particular base.
According to Marx, historical materialism is based on these principles:
- The basis of human society is how humans work on nature to produce the means of subsistence.
- There is a division of labor into social classes based on the ownership of property, where some people live on from the labor of others.
- The system of class division depends on the mode of production.
- The mode of production depends on the level of the productive forces.
- Society moves from stage to stage when the dominant class is displaced by a new emerging class, by overthrowing the “political shell” that enforces the old relations of production no longer corresponding to the new productive forces. This takes place in the superstructure of society, the political arena in the form of revolution, whereby the underclass “liberates” the productive forces with new relations of production, and social relations, corresponding to it” (Marx).
Many writers have noted that historical materialism represents a new paradigm in human thought, breaking from older ways of comprehending the basis of transformation with human society. This society reveals what Marx referred to as a “coherence” in human history, because every generation receives the productive forces generated in prior generations, and then further develops those before sending them on to their descendants. This coherence involves greater numbers of humanity, the more the forces expand develop, binding members of society together to promote production and exchange. This served as a contradiction to the idea that human history is just a set of accidents, without any unifying cause. This suggests that history is actually the outcome of struggles between the various social classes in the common economic base.
While most people understand the word “historical” in this context, the use of the word “materialism” is a bit more complicated. Historical materialism uses this word to make two distinct points which do not rely on one another for veracity. First, philosophical or metaphysical materialism, which focuses on abstractions, is not part of the conversation. Second, the idea that economic processes comprise the material basis of society. The rest of a society’s institutions and thought comes from this base. However, this does not mean that economy determines a society’s history, just like every trait of a car does not depend on its tires or its engine. This means that in the capitalist production mode, the comportment of players within the market economy (i.e. the means for producing, distributing and exchanging goods) performs a significant role in shaping society.
In his analysis of history, Marx foresaw the collapse of capitalism. In its wake would come a communist society in which conflicts based on the social classes would no longer take place. The common public would take ownership of the means of production and would use it for the good of all. In summary, it is possible to boil these beliefs down to the following principles of history:
- Progress in productive forces that a society has to use, such as labor, technology and capital goods, drive social progress.
- Humans have a basic involvement in production relations, because they constitute the most important social relations.
- Production relations move forward as productive forces permit.
- Production relations determine the types and degree of advancements in the forces of production. For example, capitalism increases the rate for development of forces, focusing on the accumulation of capital.
- Production relations and productive forces all develop independently of the will or intentions of mankind in general.
- A society’s superstructure -- its institutions, culture and other ideological materials -- serve to express the mode of production that is the foundation of society.
- Each type of nation is an institution preserving the power of the ruling class. The state is a tool that the ruling class uses to secure its own autonomy and enforce its choice for production relations onto the rest of society.
- Only political and social upheaval transfer power from one class to another within a state.
- When a paradigm of production relations no longer permits progres in production, progress either halts or a revolution takes place, permitting change.
- History in itself is not predetermined but is the outcome of the class struggle, particularly with regard to the consciousness and organization of the working class.
Society has not always featured a separate political and economic organization. The most primitive societies featured hunting and gathering as the means of production as well as the social organization. Force and relation worked together in a harmonious fashion. When feudalism took hold, the kings and nobles established relationships with the economies of the villages through the institution of serfdom. While the serfs were not free, they were connected to both the economy and politics and lacked total alienation. Capitalism, according to Marx, severs all ties between economic and political forces, leaving it up to the government to create the relationship. He looks at the state as a symbol of this separation: the purpose of the government is to administrate the conflicts of interest that develop between classes on the basis of property relations.
About three years before the death of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels asserted that he agreed with the notion of “historical materialism.” In the foreword to Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Engels wrote that “In the meantime, the Marxist world outlook has found representatives far beyond the boundaries of Germany and Europe and in all the literary languages of the world” (Engels). This meant that the Marxist conception of historical materialism had spread throughout much of the developed world. As time went by, Marx’s thoughts took the shape of Marxism, after the work of Engels and other theorists like Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Nikolai Bukharin and Georgi Plekhanov. After Lenin died in 1924, Marxism changed into Marxism-Leninism and went on to Maoism, or Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in China, which in that country came to be seen as the true communism or a state cult, depending on who you asked. Within the early 1900s, some socialist writers treated historical materialism as virtually identical to dialectical materialism, even though neither Marx nor Engels used that term. Other thinkers look as dialectical materialism as more of a philosophy, while historical materialism has more to do with sociology; these thinkers generally fell under the influence of Soviet Marxism.
In modern times, many thinkers have suggested a revision of historical materialism in light of modern discoveries in the sciences. Juergen Habermas, for example, has urged the revision of historical materialism because it has failed to account for the importance of communicative action. Goeran Therborn has asserted that the methodology of historical materialism should be turned on the movement itself, looking at its own appearance as a phenomenon resulting from economic circumstances. Regulation theory and spiral dynamics also draw heavily from historical materialism, and the sociologists Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst developed an interpretation of historical materialism based on structural Marxism.
In addition to revisions, several critiques of historical materialism have arisen. For example, scholar Walter Benjamin has compared historical materialism to the Turk, an invention from the 18th century that was marketed as a machine that could beat talented chess players but really hid a person inside who ran the machine. Benjamin’s claim was that, despite Marx’s avowals of scientific objectivity, the practice of historical materialism was really a sort of religion. Similar to the Turk, Benjamin wrote, “‘the puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight” (Lilla).
When one looks at the connection between a society and its economic mechanisms, the question as to which produces which returns to the debate between the chicken and the egg. While the hunter-gatherer society may be the most economically and politically pure, with one’s own efforts directly determining one’s ability to make it to the next week or even day, it does not represent the best possible outcome of all societies. The many utopian communities that developed in the 19th and 20th centuries, such Brook Farm, Oneida, and their descendants, all failed, for a wide variety of reasons. Some, like the Oneida debacle, fell apart because of their alteration of basic human relations. In Oneida, every man was considered the spouse of every woman, which sounds awfully liberating in theory but ended up creating a whole host of problems in practice, none of which had to do with the economic systems of production for the community. Other communities fell apart as a result of general laziness, as people who had left organized society behind to join a perfect community found themselves not wanting to do the work necessary to raise crops and survive, and so the communities fell apart. If historical materialism were true, and communism were the ultimate form of society, then it maeks sense that one of the many forms of communism that have arisen over the past 200 years would have succeeded. Instead, whether it is the tiny utopian community or the behemoth Soviet Union, all of them fell apart because of the greed and graft of the individual. Even China, which remains the last Communist superpower, holds together because of its introduction of capitalist reforms.
Several elements of historical materialism are indeed true, in their own way. The ruling classes are indeed intent on holding onto their power, whether the ostensible form of government is a dictatorship or democracy. However, the questions of human nature run more deeply than the economic systems of production. As history has demonstrated, those who rely on economics to explain everything end up unable to explain in situations that give people the freedom to share with one another, but the system falls apart anyway.
Works Cited
Engels, Fredrich. “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Introduction) Materialism.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/int-mat.htm
Lilla, Mark. “The Riddle of Walter Benjamin,” The New York Review of Books, May 25,
1995.
Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Contribution_to_the_Critique_of_Political_Economy.pdf
