Marx and Historical Materialism

Part philosophy, part social theory, historical materialism is a formal construct Karl Marx developed to explain the why and the how of economic and social change. It is based on the premise that we all derive our meaning from the physical world in general and define ourselves by what we produce. But the means and manner of this production never remain static for long, so internal conflict is unavoidable. All well and good says Marx, since it invariably leads to wider political and social change.

Keywords Base; Dialectic; Dialectical Materialism; Division of Labor; Forces of Production; Materialism; Mode of Production; Relations of Production; Superstructure; Surplus Value

Marx & Historical Materialism

Overview

Some consider Marx's historical materialism an overly simplistic answer to a very basic question: what causes society to change? Others still consider it a sound, systematic explanation. No one, however, would deny that, conceptually at least, it is the keystone of Marxist theory, the philosophic underpinning of an ideology that views the world as profoundly economic in scope and nature. More to the point for our purposes, historical materialism was one of the first comprehensive theories to emerge during the mid- to late- nineteenth century in the then nascent discipline of sociology. To understand Marx the philosopher and social theorist, one has to appreciate the boldness and originality of his central ideas.

Marx & Hegel

With a certainty bordering on bravado, Marx flatly rejected the basic premise of the preeminent philosopher of his youth, Georg Hegel. An idealist, Hegel believed the real world was actually the embodiment of a higher, abstract order. A man was more than a just man, Hegel thought, he was an incarnation of an absolute spirit. As such, his everyday needs and place in civil society, though immanently appreciable, were actually just manifestations of a universal, abstract life-force (Jeannot, 1988). Marx, on the contrary, believed that the true essence of a person or thing lay entirely in the person of thing itself. For meaning, then, man had only to look to his physical surroundings and, more importantly, to what he made out of them (Kain, 1981). Consciousness, when all's said and done, originated in the material world not outside it, Marx thought.

Interestingly, though Marx may have jettisoned Hegel's abstract forms in favor of concrete reality, he never abandoned Hegel's belief that dialectic conflict lay at the heart of all change. In Hegel's account, the dialectic process pits a thesis against its antithesis until a synthesis of the two emerges as a new idea, viewpoint, or relationship. Hegel thought the dialectic revealed the "rational" unity underlying the world and was the source of the unbroken moral and spiritual progress of history. Marx thought it revealed exploitation, class struggle, and the inevitable demise of the capitalist system.

Marx & Feuerbach

Marx also drew upon the ideas of another near-contemporary, Feuerbach. Equally disenchanted with Hegel's quasi-religious metaphysics, Feuerbach championed sensuality, emotion, and all things human in their place. What's more, he believed that a person could be defined in a number of ways because he or she assumes a number of distinct roles in society each and every day. Philosophic inquiry, therefore, was fundamentally an anthropological exercise. Man was much more than the material world he lived in, Feuerbach argued, and was thus the philosopher's true subject.

Not so, said Marx: social relations were part and parcel of the material world, for collaboration and the resulting human discourse, as Marx famously said, allow us to produce the goods necessary for our survival. And were it not for what we produce, we would be like any other animal. Our labor and "instruments" of production along with the social relations that compliment them effectively define our being, Marx thought (Sayer, 1975).

Marx & Durkheim

Later nineteenth-century social theorists would also come to view man as a "social animal." Émile Durkheim, the first practitioner of empirical sociological inquiry, seconded Marx's belief in the importance of social relations, if for very different reasons. Durkheim's chief concern was to find an explanation for the growing purposelessness and alienation he observed in people, a condition he called anomie. After much research, he attributed it to a decline in values and mores brought on by economic dislocation and rapid urbanization. Durkheim and Marx held diametrically opposed views, though, on the nature of the resulting social conflict. An adherent of economic determinism, Marx saw class struggle as historically inevitable. A strong believer in social cohesion, Durkheim saw class struggle more as a sort of open wound in need of healing (Østerberg, 1979).

Marx's own thinking was influenced in turn by other ground-breaking theorists, most notably the naturalist Charles Darwin whose On The Origins of the Species was published the same year as Marx's seminal A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Both works espoused a theory of evolution—one biological, the other socioeconomic—that operated outside humankind's agency or control. Marx initially embraced Darwin's idea of natural selection because it served as a useful counterpoint to his own idea of class struggle. Eventually, though, Marx grew alarmed when Darwin's followers sought to explain and justify contemporary capitalist society via natural selection (Nolan, 2002).

Further Insights

The Base & the Superstructure

If, as Marx insisted, the dialectic drives history, what are the fundamental forces that continually clash to create a new socioeconomic synthesis? There is perhaps no more basic question in all of Marxism. The doctrinaire answer is the base (or, the forces and relations of production), and the superstructure (or, the sociopolitical institutions and values that evolve to foster and protect said production). Marx ardently believed and tirelessly argued that economics ultimately determine everything. Indeed, he spent more time thinking and writing about exchange value, surplus value, labor-time, and declining rates of profit than any other topic.

The forces of production include:

• the workforce;

• the technical expertise required to maintain and foster actual production techniques; and,

• the organizational knowledge needed to efficiently muster, train, and deploy needed skilled labor along functional lines.

The means of production are made up of the tools, machines, plants, and related infrastructure needed to produce goods on the one hand, and, on the other, the actual raw materials that are given added value through production. Combined, the means and forces of production form the material basis of life.

The social interaction between workers amongst themselves and with owners, meanwhile, are the relations of production. In capitalism, these relations are defined by the private ownership of the means of production by the bourgeoisie, in socialism by public ownership. Critically, given the dynamism of both the forces and relations of production, the two invariably clash. In Marx's view, though, the forces of production always win out, in the end triggering first economic then broader sociopolitical change.

In the interim before this change, though, the cohesion between the two takes on an identifiable shape or distinctive mode of production. The base-a given economic structure-gives rise to a societal superstructure (Wacquant, 1985). For, as Marx saw it, every mode of production requires a corresponding social order to perpetuate itself materially. This materially based social order is equally evident within the family, among and between different classes, and throughout the civic, religious, and intellectual fabric of all nations. According to Marx, history's primary function is to identify and analyze the root causes of each past dominant mode of production.

Modes of Production

Marx never actually discussed his theory of history in great detail, much less the actual methodology he used to arrive at it. He nonetheless considered all historical change a by-product of evolving human "productive power," and believed it was his role to catalogue how well or poorly a given society accommodated or stymied this evolution. In a word, in the Marxian universe economics mold all that is social, political, and spiritual in life. Economics manifests itself in the laws we must obey, the governments to which we owe nominal allegiance, and in the ideologies and belief systems we uphold.

Marxists divide history into six successive modes of production: the primitive, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, capitalist, and socialist. Production in the earliest of these modes was organized along kinship lines, the distribution of communal wealth, and a flat social hierarchy. People lived hand-to-mouth, first as bands of nomads, then as tribes of subsistence farmers. Humankind however was not destined to this life in perpetuity. Eventually, the innately dynamic "productive forces" of humankind led to improved crop yields and food surpluses. As the scale of agricultural production grew, so too did the need to better coordinate the use of natural resources and labor.

This task initially fell to the priesthood, then to secular bureaucracies who lived off the surpluses of farm workers. Outright state ownership of large tracts of arable land largely replaced communal village holdings in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, and America. This consolidation was required, in part, to feed large standing armies and growing urban populations. This Asiatic mode of production lasted in some parts of the world for over a thousand years.

The early western civilizations of Greece and Rome evolved differently. Land was privately-held and increasingly worked by slaves. Only a citizen—a duly recognized member of an elite body politic with both rights and obligations—could own property. One was thus either a patrician with rank and wealth, a commoner or plebian who typically earned a modest living as an artisan or tradesman, or a slave who was literally someone else's property and without any rights whatsoever. Anarchic economic conditions caused by the dissolution of the Roman Empire brought an end to this so-called ancient mode of production. Agriculture of course continued, but on large estates where laborers worked in exchange for protection and a subsistence living.

The estates were apportioned to members of the political-military elite who appropriated any agricultural surplus. What remained after the estate owner paid his soldiers and his overload's share was his to spend, provided he kept his obligations to his tenants. They in turn, though legally "free," were bound by their obligations to till his land and perform other services. Said serfdom was the hallmark of the feudal mode of production (Habermas, 1975).

Conflict between the elite, who controlled the political and military establishment, and the peasantry, who manned and effectively ran the economy, was inevitable. The peasants were not the only ones who suffered, moreover, for less and less was re-invested into the land itself, undermining the very means of production. Serfdom's eventual demise precipitated the next mode of production: capitalism. Within this system commoners were free to sell their labor to producers who, in turn, were free to directly sell their wares to the highest bidder.

With nothing of material value to offer besides their sheer labor-power, peasants and workers were literally forced to sell themselves. Marx saw a certain irony in this, for the peasant-class' success in overturning the feudal system resulted only in the vast majority of peasants being reduced to day laborers. A minority of peasants, though, consolidated their land holdings, introduced new cultivation techniques, and prospered as commercial tenants of the large landowners. With the lifting of traditional strictures against buying, selling, or renting land, these peasant-proprietors would go on to become the modern world's first owners of private property (Katz ,1993).

In a further irony, though, the very cash economy many owed their new found prosperity to would soon desert them. Owners of large feudal estates in England were in constant need of money. In feudal times, very little of what was produced ever got to market: over half was appropriated by the landlords, and much of the remaining half was consumed by its direct producers. A strictly cash economy changed all this. The so-called use value of an item receded as its exchange value—the amount of other goods that could be bought from its sale represented in monetary terms—came increasingly to the fore.

Production, moreover, was now predicated more on profit-minded market demand, and less on the laborer's immediate material needs. The latter lesson became painful clear in late medieval England. By then, demand for scarce wool in Flanders's flourishing textiles trade caused its price to spike. Large land owners accustomed to life's fineries needed cash just as the farm hand, though considerably more. In short order, these estate-owners began to convert their fields into pastures to raise sheep instead of cereals and grains. Feudal and commercial tenants alike were summarily driven off the land. Many migrated to towns and cities, creating a ready-made market and an ample supply of cheap labor. A new class of entrepreneurial-minded guild artisans, petty burghers, and tradesmen who could bootstrap their way into the bourgeoisie was also created (Birnbaum, 1953).

Capitalism arose as a mode of production because of its two unique innovations in the relations of production. One of these was the division of labor, or the compartmentalization of the manufacturing processes to promote greater efficiency on the factory floor. The other was technology, the mechanical means of making goods at a faster rate than manual laborers ever could. Together, these two innovations allowed factory owners to increase daily output without increasing wages, and thereby sell more goods and earn higher returns. Marx called the net difference surplus value.

But competition invariably ate into said profits, and machinery had to be purchased before it could be used. So owners would appropriate ever more surplus value from an ever decreasing pool of labor. Eventually, Marx thought, everyone except the very, very rich would end up paupers. Unless, that is, workers overthrew this highly exploitive economic system first and replaced it with a more equitable one. That this revolution was predestined by virtue of capitalism's irreconcilable internal contradictions Marx had little doubt. He was equally certain that a socialist mode of production based on collective ownership would succeed it (Worsley, 2002).

Viewpoints

After Marx

Late in his life Marx reputedly said, "I'm not a Marxist." It was a sardonic comment, directed at the growing number of his professed disciples who he thought were by far too eager to reinterpret his ideas. Marxism in fact lives on as a theory and a belief-system to this very day largely because others—Lenin and Mao amongst them—revised it to meet changing circumstances. Anyone who has read most or all of the Marxist canon cannot help but be impressed by how ingenious the philosophy's adapters have been. Perhaps the most inventive addendum of all is dialectical materialism, a concept formalized in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. It holds that Marxism must adjust to the material basis of a life that is constantly in flux, with one major proviso: any change in doctrine must be arrived at through the dialectic.

Still, historical materialism has certain structural elements no theorist can alter without undermining the basic premises defined by Marx himself. These constants are responsible for all of the world's change, Marxists' hold:

• Periodically the forces and the relations of productions fall out of alignment;

• The productive forces invariably prevail in the ensuing conflict; and

• More conducive relations of production emerge from this conflict and, with them, a new superstructure until the socialist mode of production presents itself.

Marx fervently believed that once private property was eliminated and the price of goods once again equal to the labor expended in making them, the forces and relations of production would be harmonized forever after. More recent history, of course, has proved otherwise, though some Marxists still hold that the rise and fall of communism were preludes to a grander socialist mode of production of the future, one predestined by historical materialism.

Terms & Concepts

Base: The forces and relations of production.

Dialectic: A process through which ostensibly opposite ideas, the thesis and antithesis, are pitted against one another and resolved within the synthesis, which unifies them.

Dialectical Materialism: Marx's underlying philosophy, it understands material life to be in a state of constant change as opposing forces conflict and are synthesized.

Division of Labor: Specialization of the work force to optimize production.

Forces of Production: Labor, its technical expertise, and the organization of the work-flow that optimizes both.

Materialism: The philosophic view that all meaning is derived exclusively from the physical world.

Means of Production: Privately owned tools, machines, plants, and related infrastructure.

Mode of Production: A distinct economic system and the supporting social and legal institutions unique to it.

Relations of Production: The social interaction that arise from the division of labor on the one hand, and the ownership of the means of production on the other.

Superstructure: The legal, political, and social systems along with the familial, cultural, and religious values that collectively buttress the forces and relations of production necessary to sustain life.

Surplus Value: Essentially, the value added to goods when a laborer works his or her usual number of hours but, because of machinery and the division of labor, produces more. Owners selling goods produced in such a manner earn higher profits and keep this additional sales revenue for themselves.

Bibliography

Birnbaum, N. (1953). Conflicting interpretations of the rise of capitalism: Marx and Weber. British Journal of Sociology, 4 , 125–141. Retrieved April 5, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=17391702&site=ehost-live

Brown, M. E., & Halley, J. A. (2012). Culture, theory, and critique: Marx, Durkheim, and human science. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 30, 151–178. Retrieved October 23, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=84964097

Habermas, J. (1975). Towards a reconstruction of historical materialism. Theory & Society, 2 , 287–300. Retrieved April 4, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=10653226&site=ehost-live

Jeannot, T. (1988). Philosophical presuppositions of Marx's labour theory of value. International Journal of Social Economics, 15 , 33–57. Retrieved April 12, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=5776810&site=ehost-live

Kain, P. (1981). Marx's theory of ideas. History & Theory, 20 , 357–378. Retrieved April 4, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=4889081&site=ehost-live

Katz, C. (1993). Karl Marx on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Theory & Society, 22 , 363–389. Retrieved April 8, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=10756004&site=ehost-live

Nolan, P. (2002). What's Darwinian about historical materialism? A critique of Levine and Sober.Historical Materialism, 10 , 143–169. Retrieved April 4, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=10475906&site=ehost-live

Østerberg, D. (1979). III. The concept of anomie and historical materialism. International Journal of Sociology, 9 , 63–74. Retrieved April 8, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=10197509&site=ehost-live

Sayer, D. (1975). Method and dogma in historical materialism. Sociological Review, 23 , 779–810. Retrieved April 4, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=5461053&site=ehost-live

Wacquant, L. (1985). Heuristic models in Marxian theory. Social Forces, 64 , 17–45. Retrieved March 12, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=5287489&site=ehost-live

Worsley, P. (2002). The model of capitalism: British political economy. In Marx & Marxism (pp. 30–58). Abingdon: Routledge. Retrieved April 7, 2008 EBSCO Online Database from SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=17445517&site=ehost-live

Xiaoping, W. (2010). Rethinking historical materialism: The new edition of The German Ideology. Science & Society, 74, 489–508. Retrieved October 23, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=55274213

Suggested Reading

Chibber, V. (2011). What is living and what is dead in the Marxist theory of history. Historical Materialism, 19, 60–91. Retrieved October 23, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=62825537

Fracchia, J. (2005). Beyond the human-nature debate: Human corporeal organisation as the 'first fact' of historical materialism. Historical Materialism, 13 , 33–61. Retrieved April 4, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=16696454&site=ehost-live

Freidheim, E. (1976). Karl Marx. In Sociological Theory and Research Practice (pp. 41–53). Rochester, VT: Schenkman Books. Retrieved March 12, 2008 from SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=6826829&site=ehost-live

Fulcher, J. (2003). Theories and theorizing: Pioneers of social theory. In Sociology (pp. 22–32).

Grafstein, R. (1984). Philosophical issues in the study of historical materialism. Social Science Quarterly, 65 , 955–960. Retrieved April 4, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=16563417&site=ehost-live

Guthrie, E. (1941). Historical materialism and its sociological critics. Social Forces, 20 , 172–184. Retrieved April 4, 2008 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=13907235&site=ehost-live

Tsolakis, A. (2011). A historical materialist response to the 'clash of civilizations' thesis. Global Society: Journal of Interdisciplinary International Relations, 25, 155–180. Retrieved October 23, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX with Full Text: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=60107106