Historical Materialism

Historical Materialism: Marxism's materialist conception of history represents an important epistemological break with the idealism of all previous conceptions of history, including that of Hegel. In The German Ideology, written during the mid-1840's (but not published in its entirety until 1932), Marx and Engels began to articulate the concept of historical materialism that informs all of their later work. Developed in the context of Hegel's dialectical understanding of history, historical materialism accepts the notion that history evolves according to general tendencies and that it is scientifically possible to predict future possibilities on the basis of past and present conditions. Unlike all previous understandings of history, however, historical materialism focuses on concrete experience as opposed to ideal abstractions.

Thus, Marx famously turns Hegel on his head--where Hegel and other traditional historians and economists began by examining concrete human experience and from that elaborated abstract and general principles, Marx begins by identifying abstract and general principles in order to arrive finally at a description of concrete experience that is not distorted by idealist assumptions. He describes the theory and methodology of historical materialism briefly in the "Preface" to his Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (see especially the red-highlighted passages). There Marx argues that humans inevitably enter into social relations which are "independent of their will" and are instead determined by the relations of production appropriate to the existing stage of development of the material forces of production. The "material forces of production" are the tools, skills, knowledge, technologies and forms of organization that are available for material production at any given time. The "relations of production" are the ways in which the forces of production, resources, and the products themselves are owned and distributed. "The totality of these relations of production," Marx argues,

constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. ("Preface," A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) [Emphasis added]

The statement that I have emphasized in bold type represents one of the most powerful insights of the Marxist analysis of culture. Hence, for example, a political system such as "democracy" cannot be understood as an idea developed in an abstract philosophical system which is eventually put into concrete social practice by a group of enlighted leaders. Rather, the "idea" of "democracy" itself is made possible by a concrete set of material conditions in the first place, and whether or not and to what degree the "idea" may be realized in a given society will depend upon the the material conditions prevalent in the society.

The preface of the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy also provides an account of social change. Marx assumes that the levels of productive forces are dynamic, and will eventually outgrow the capacity a given set of relations of production to sustain that growth. "At a certain stage of development," Marx writes,

the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or -- this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms --with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic -- in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. ("Preface," A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)

Thus, the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production eventually leads to revolutionary change. The relationship between forces and relations of production corresponds closely to the relationship between "base and superstructure." In an early text such as the The Communist Manifesto this appears to be a relatively mechanististic, straightforwardly causal relationship, with the base determining the superstructure. But in other places Marx provides more nuanced accounts of the relationship. We'll be returning to this issue.