Marx’s theory of history, or historical materialism as it is known, is the materialist dialectic applied to the sphere of human history. It is also, in a sense, the core theory of Marxism as a whole. Engels, when summarising Marx’s theoretical achievements in his speech at his graveside in 1883, gave pride of place to historical materialism: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history” (K Marx and F Engels, Selected Works, Vol 2, as above, p167). Marx himself called it “the guiding principle of my studies” (D McLellan, ed, as above, p389). Indeed historical materialism is sometimes used as a synonym for Marxist theory in its totality. It is what structures a Marxist view of the overall development of human history and where contemporary society, including our own struggles within that society, fit into the larger picture. It is the starting point (here I emphasise starting point) that Marxists use every day for the analysis of current events and ideological arguments.
The starting point of historical materialism is extremely simple and clearly set out by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology:
The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live…
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. (D McLellan, ed, as above, p161)
The physical organisation of humans determines that in order to live, even for days or weeks, they require water, food, shelter, perhaps clothing, etc. Moreover, as we have seen, human beings distinguished themselves from animals by actively producing these means of subsistence (through social labour and cultural tool-making). From this it follows that the foundation for the analysis of all human historical development and every human society is production and how it is organised.
In analysing human production Marx then made a very important (we shall see its full importance a bit later) conceptual distinction between “forces of production” and “relations of production”. The forces of production are those things which make up a society’s general capacity to produce goods – its natural resources, labour and technology (including the knowledge to make and use that technology). The relations of production are the social relations that people enter into in order to engage in production. The development of the wheel, iron tools, the windmill, the steam engine, the computer and contemporary China’s vast supply of labour are all examples of the advance of the productive forces. An aboriginal hunting party, a slave working on the estate of a Roman patrician, a medieval serf ploughing his lord’s land, a tenant farmer paying rent to his landlord, Henry Ford employing thousands of workers in his motor company and Wal-Mart employing over 2 million people worldwide, are all examples of relations of production.
Clearly forces and relations of production are not separate entities – you can’t have “forces” without “relations” or “relations” without “forces” – but two aspects of a single process which continually interact and influence each other. However, Marx identified one of the aspects, the forces of production, as more fundamental and ultimately more dynamic and decisive than the other. At bottom it is the level of development of the forces of production which conditions or shapes the relations of production. However, and this is important, this “conditioning” is not a mechanical or absolute determinism. A society in which the productive forces permit only hunting and gathering, as was the case for most of human history, produces the social relations of the small nomadic hunting clans. The development of agriculture and with it settled communities (villages and towns) and the ability to create and store a surplus of produce over and above what is needed for immediate survival give rise to the differentiation between rich and poor, to class divisions and to such production relations as slavery and later, serfdom. Manufacturing and modern industrial production bring with them the production relation of wage labour. Here it is important to note that these capitalist relations of production exercise a major influence on the development of the productive forces, both driving them forward because of the dynamic of competitive capital accumulation in booms and fettering or throwing them back in crises, but this does not change the ultimate primacy of the productive forces in this dialectical relationship.
This combination of forces and relations of production results in the formation of a series of modes of production, definite socio-economic systems which dominate whole epochs of human history. Broadly speaking we can identify the following modes of production: hunting and gathering or primitive communism; ancient (slave) society; the Asiatic mode of production (traditional India, China, etc); feudalism; capitalism.*
It is not possible to give exact dates for these modes of production particularly as they last for different lengths of time in different parts of the world – for example primitive communism ceased to be the dominant mode of production with the development of agriculture about 12,000 to 8,000 years ago, but continued to exist in some places, such as the Kalahari Desert, well into the 20th century, and serfdom died out in England in the 14th century but survived in Russia until 1861. However, it is useful to give a very rough periodisation, especially for the newcomer to these concepts. Thus ancient society, or the slave mode of production, refers to the societies of Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and elsewhere and comes to an end with the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. It is succeeded, in Europe, by feudalism, which lasts through the Middle Ages and starts to be superseded by capitalism in the 16th century. Capitalism achieves its initial breakthroughs in Holland and England and becomes the dominant system in the world with the French Revolution of 1789-94 and the industrial revolution in Britain. The Asiatic mode of production survives until it is overwhelmed by European capitalist imperialism.
Many people believe that in the 20th century a whole range of countries – the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc – passed beyond capitalism and became socialist. In the author’s opinion this was and is an illusion and, with the exception of the early years of the Russian Revolution, these countries were state capitalist, ie they were versions of the capitalist mode of production.
In forming the mode of production, the forces and relations of production also constitute the economic base of society on which, Marx says, “rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general” (D McLellan, ed, as above, p389). This brings us back to the point about social being determining consciousness already discussed in the section on materialism. For Marx politics, philosophy, religion, art, etc are all part of the superstructure and their development depends on and is conditioned by the development of the base. Any major change in social consciousness – for example the secularisation process in Europe or the rise of nationalism – has its roots in changes in the forces and relations of production. The relationship here is by no means simple or mechanical. For one thing, ideas have a tendency to cling on and survive after their immediate material basis has disappeared. “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” writes Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (D McLellan, ed, as above, p300), explaining why Martin Luther “donned the mask of the Apostle Paul” and the French Revolution of 1789 draped itself as the Roman Republic. For another, the relationship between material conditions and the world of ideas can be an inverted one (as in a “camera obscura”, as Marx puts it). Thus the English romantic poets and artists (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable, Turner, etc) turned to nature themes at just the moment that, and because, Britain was going through its industrial revolution and massive urbanisation was taking place. Nevertheless, the relationship is real and all historical materialist analysis of political and intellectual life sets out from this premise.
The most important element in the superstructure is the state apparatus and its legal system. By this is meant a cluster of interlinked institutions including the armed forces, the security services, the government, ministries, parliament, the police, the judiciary, the prisons, etc. Between them these institutions lay claim to ultimate authority in society and the sole right to exercise serious physical force. Crucially, in modern society, the state also lays claim to political and social neutrality. It is presented and presents itself as standing outside and above the conflicts between different interest groups and shades of opinion, like an unbiased referee.
Marx rejects this as self-serving myth. For Marx the state is never neutral but always directly or indirectly the state of the economically dominant class and its primary function is the preservation of the existing social and economic order. “The executive of the modern state”, says Marx in the Communist Manifesto, “is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (D McLellan, ed, as above, p223). Likewise the law is not a set of eternal or abstract principles but a codification of the property relations, relations of production and behaviour patterns required by a particular mode of production.
Sometimes – Nazi Germany is an example – the state, in terms of its personnel and policies, can be detached from the direct control of the economically dominant class. An earlier example, that of Napoleon III (nephew of Napoleon I), Emperor of France 1852-70, was analysed by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, hence the phenomenon became known as “Bonapartism”. But even in these exceptional cases the state rests fundamentally on an economic base which it is required to maintain and defend.
As Marx showed in practice in The Eighteenth Brumaire, and as Engels was at pains to explain in a series of letters written towards the end of his life, historical materialism does not maintain or imply a mechanical or rigid relationship between base and superstructure. It is not, as has often been alleged, a theory of economic determinism. Rather there is a complex and dialectical interaction between base and superstructure in which certain elements develop a degree of autonomy and exercise a definite influence in the course of history. Engels writes:
The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its results…juridical forms… The reflexes of all these actual struggles, in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, and religious views also exercise their influence on the cause of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. (K Marx and F Engels, Selected Works, Vol 2, as above, p488)
Nevertheless the base, human productive activity, remains primary and all historical analysis, all theory, must proceed from the base to the superstructure, not the other way round. This is a core proposition of Marxism, because as Engels said, “mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc” (as above, p167).
Historical materialism’s most important task is to explain the dynamic of history and in particular how one mode of production changes (and therefore can be changed) into another. For Marx the precondition for such a change is the development of a contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production. As we have seen, the productive forces condition the relations of production and, therefore, at first these relations assist or allow the further development of the productive forces. But over time the productive forces continue to grow – historical materialism assumes a general tendency towards such growth simply because human beings will tend to find more effective ways of producing goods – until they reach the point where their further development requires the establishment of new relations:
At a certain stage of development the material productive forces of society came 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. (D McLellan, ed, as above, p389)
Note that the contradiction between the forces and relations of production is not resolved smoothly or automatically but through revolution. To understand how and why this is the case we have to put flesh on the abstractions of forces and relations of production. As we have seen in the section on class struggle, the relations of production of a society form the basis of its class structure. Indeed from the moment humankind moved beyond primitive communism, the fundamental relations of production, ie those relating to ownership and control of the means and process of production, are class relations – between slave owners and slaves, lords and serfs, capitalists and workers. Thus in any mode of production there is a dominant or ruling class which has a vested interest in the preservation of the existing society. Moreover this class has at its disposal the power of the state and ideology. As Marx says, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, ie the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force” (D McLellan, ed, as above, p176).
Likewise the forces of production do not consist only of technology but also of the human beings whose labour and knowledge work that technology – they form a social class or classes. The contradiction between the developing forces of production and the old or existing relations of production is therefore at the same time a class struggle. The class struggle, the struggle between the exploiters and the exploited, is, of course, continuous. But it is the development of the conflict between the forces and relations of production to the point where it throws society into crisis that creates the possibility of defeat for the ruling class and victory for the oppressed class.
Equally the change from one mode of production to another is put on the historical agenda by the conflict between the forces and relations of production coming to a head, but its actual achievement requires the revolutionary overthrow of the old ruling class by a new rising class linked to the developing forces of production. Moreover, experience has shown that the outcome of this revolutionary process is by no means guaranteed in advance. It depends partly on objective factors such as the depth of the crisis in society and the relative size and economic strength of the opposed classes, but also on subjective factors such as the level of consciousness, organisation and, crucially, political leadership of the revolutionary class.
In this brief account of historical materialism I have flagged up several issues – the way in which Marxism is not a philosophy of economic determinism, the role of ideology and the role of political leadership – which will be taken up and explored further in subsequent chapters.
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* This list is not exhaustive. There may have been other modes of production and there is debate among Marxist historians about the concept of the Asiatic mode of production (is it distinct or a version of feudalism?) and about the mode of production in Aztec and Inca societies, for example, but these questions need not detain us here.