Historical materialism: What Marx thought moves history
A guide to historical materialism: the five claims packed into Marx's most-quoted paragraph, why the word "determines" has been fought over ever since, and what is left of the theory after a century of argument.
In January 1859, Karl Marx wrote a preface to a book about money, trade and production. He used it to explain where his ideas had come from. 1
In 1842–43 he had been editing a Cologne newspaper, forced to take sides on forest thefts and the condition of Moselle peasants. The experience pushed him toward economics. 1
The preface compresses the result into a single paragraph. Marx called it the conclusion that "became the guiding principle of my studies". 1
That paragraph became the doctrine. Marx and Engels offered it as a guiding thread for research, not as a finished science. 2
"The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life," Marx wrote. 1
Then the sentence everyone quotes: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." 1
Two further moves complete the sketch. Productive forces outgrow the relations of production; the relations become "fetters"; "then begins an era of social revolution". 1
The modes of production, "the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois", are "epochs marking progress in the economic development of society". 1
Five claims sit inside that paragraph, and they do not stand or fall together.
Five claims inside one paragraph
| The claim | What it says | Who rejects it |
|---|---|---|
| Relations of production | People enter productive relations "independent of their will", matched to the stage of the productive forces. 1 | Anyone who thinks economic arrangements are chosen by politics. |
| The base | Those relations form "the economic structure of society, the real foundation". 1 | Historians who treat the economy as one domain among others. |
| The superstructure | Law, politics and "definite forms of social consciousness" arise on that foundation. 1 | Anyone who thinks ideas and institutions have independent histories. |
| Fettering | The forces outgrow the relations, the relations become fetters, revolution follows. 1 | Those who see change as gradual and interest-driven. |
| The sequence | The modes form successive epochs of economic development. 1 | Anyone holding a history that fits none of the slots. |
Two rows carry almost all of the argument. The superstructure claim is the one critics call determinism, and the sequence claim is the one non-European history breaks.
One word is missing. Class struggle, which most readers expect, never appears in the paragraph. 3
G.A. Cohen's reconstruction, the most rigorous we have, gives class struggle a small role. The canonical text gave it none. 3
What "material" rules out
Materialism here says nothing about money, greed or consumer appetite.
It says where explanation should begin: with how a society feeds, houses and clothes itself, and with who owns the fields, tools and workshops. 1
The German Ideology states the reversal in one sentence. "In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven." 4
The target is Hegel, for whom history was spirit working itself out in institutions. 3
Marx keeps Hegel's conviction that history has a direction and drops the spirit. What moves instead is productive activity. 3
The sharpest consequence is the passage on ideology. "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas," because the class holding "the means of material production" also controls "the means of mental production". 5
Read carefully, that claim concerns presses, schools, pulpits and studios, and who pays for them. 5
It does not say the ruling ideas are false, and it does not say anyone planned them.
The word "determines"
Engels spent his last decade explaining what that word was not meant to carry. 6
"According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life," he wrote to Joseph Bloch. "Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted." 6
Anyone who turns this into the claim that the economic element alone determines everything has produced "a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase". 6
Then the admission. Marx and Engels were "ourselves partly to blame", because they had pressed the main principle against adversaries who denied it. 6
The letter leaves a problem it never solves. If the economy is only "ultimately" decisive, and everything else acts back, what does the claim rule out?
Raymond Williams found the trouble in the English word. Determination came from theology carrying two meanings: total prefiguration, and the setting of limits. 7
| The reading | Who holds it | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Economic causation | The version Engels called senseless, and the version critics attack 6 | Politics, law and religion visibly act back, so it is false as stated. |
| Interaction, decisive "in the end" | Engels, 1890 6 | Almost nothing is excluded, so almost nothing is predicted. |
| Functional explanation | G.A. Cohen, 1978 3 | Needs a mechanism that selects structures, and none has been supplied. |
| Limits and pressure | Williams, 1973 7 | Gives up the prediction that made the theory a political force. |
The rows are not equally expensive. The first is false as stated, the second is close to empty, and the last two are live positions.
Two gears: structure and struggle
The preface describes pressure building inside a mode of production. Forces grow, property relations hold them, and the mismatch ends in revolution. 1
Nothing in that account says who does the revolting. Marx's historical writing supplies the agent. 8
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." 8
In the Brumaire, circumstances constrain action. In the preface, they select an outcome. A constraint leaves room for revolutions that were lost; a selected outcome leaves none.
The most serious defence, and its price
Before Cohen, English-language political philosophy did not treat the theory as a coherent position at all. H.B. Acton's verdict in 1955 was that Marxism is "a philosophical farrago". 3
G.A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History (1978) changed that by rebuilding the theory to analytic standards. 3
Two theses do the work. The development thesis holds that the productive forces tend to grow. The primacy thesis holds that the economic structure is explained by the level of those forces, and the superstructure by the structure. 3
Cohen's innovation lies in the form of the explanation. Capitalism exists because it develops the forces, and it is replaced when it stops. 3
That is a functional explanation: the consequence explains the thing.
Jon Elster pressed the obvious objection. A function without a bearer is a purpose nobody holds. 3
Simone Weil had put it more sharply decades earlier. Marx "conceived history ... as though he attributed to matter what is the very essence of mind — an unceasing aspiration towards the best". 3
Cohen's reply is biology. Hollow bones are explained by flight, and natural selection supplies the mechanism no designer supplied. 3
The reply carries a price. Selection is contingent, so a theory modelled on it cannot say which society comes next. 3
The empirical question is separate, and the Stanford Encyclopedia does not soften it. "The empirical record is patchy at best", with long periods of stagnation and regression under structures nobody overthrew. 3
The ladder Marx refused to universalise
The sequence is the most quotable claim and the weakest. 1
In 1877 a Russian critic turned the historical sketch into "an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people". Marx objected in print. 9
The chapter on primitive accumulation, he answered, "does not pretend to do more than trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist order of economy emerged from the womb of the feudal order of economy". 9
Four years later he was blunter with Vera Zasulich. The "historical inevitability" of the course described in Capital is "expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe". 10
He added that the Russian village commune might be "the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia", which is not the answer a stage-theorist gives. 10
The five-stage ladder belongs to the movement that canonised him. "Dialectical materialism" was coined by Joseph Dietzgen in 1887, entered Marxist literature through Plekhanov in the 1890s, and was fixed by Soviet textbooks. 11
That makes the ladder a codification rather than a quotation. Marx's own letters are the evidence against reading it back into him.
The transition problem
If the theory is a research programme rather than a prophecy, its test is the change it cared about most: the end of feudalism. 12
Two explanations dominated the field when Robert Brenner wrote in 1976. The commercialization model made capitalism the growth of trade once legal and political barriers fell. The demographic model made population the driver. 12
Neither explained why England, France and eastern Europe diverged under similar pressures. 12
Brenner's answer was class structure. In England it produced agrarian capitalism; in eastern Europe the same grain market tightened serfdom instead of dissolving it. 12
That is the theory doing the work it can do. It forces an explanation of an institution back onto the relations of production. 12
It also shows the theory surviving by revision, which is what a research programme does and what a prophecy cannot.
What happened to the superstructure
Williams takes the metaphor apart from the inside. 7
"When we talk of 'the base'," he writes, "we are talking of a process and not a state". 7
His test case comes from Marx's Grundrisse. The piano-maker is a productive worker and the pianist is not. "So piano-maker is base, but pianist superstructure." 7
Williams calls that a dead end, and the dead end is instructive. A metaphor that assigns whole crafts to a layer explains nothing about them.
His repair is to redefine the relation. Determination becomes "the setting of limits and the exertion of pressure", not "a predicted, prefigured and controlled content". 7
What survives is thinner and more usable. The conditions of production set the terms on which everything else is made, without writing the script. 7
Two places the theory is still working
The first is ecology. Writing about large-scale agriculture, Marx called progress in capitalist farming "a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil". 13
Capitalist production, he wrote, "only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker". 13
John Bellamy Foster named the pattern the metabolic rift and credited Marx with it. The phrase is Foster's; the passage is Marx's. 13
Research since traces nutrient, carbon and energy flows through the town-country split Marx described, and the accounting is empirical. 13
The second is race. Cedric Robinson argued in Black Marxism (1983) that "the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions". 14
His target was the assumption that capitalism dissolved the ascriptive hierarchies of feudalism. It reorganised them and kept them at work. 14
Both extensions ask the production question in its strong form: who works, who owns, and what the system needs in order to keep running. 1314
A reading frame
Five questions take apart the next historical-materialist claim you meet.
- Which claim is being made? Relations of production, superstructure, fettering and sequence fail separately. 1
- What is the material condition? Name the work, the ownership and the technique, or the claim is empty. 1
- Is it a limit or a cause? Setting limits and exerting pressure is not the same as guaranteeing an outcome. 7
- One country or all of them? Marx restricted the historical inevitability to Western Europe. 10
- What would count as failure? Fettering predicts a stall before a collapse, so survival through long stagnation counts against it. 3
The sentence in the 1859 preface survives best as an instruction. Before explaining an institution by the ideas behind it, ask what it costs to run and who pays. 1
That question has outlived the predictions, and it is the part of the theory still earning its keep.
References
- 1
- 2Wikipedia, "Historical materialism"
en.wikipedia.org
- 3Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Karl Marx"
plato.stanford.edu
- 4Marx and Engels, *The German Ideology*, ch. 1
marxists.org
- 5
- 6Engels to Joseph Bloch, 21 September 1890
marxists.org
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10Marx, reply to Vera Zasulich, 8 March 1881
marxists.org
- 11Wikipedia, "Dialectical materialism"
en.wikipedia.org
- 12Wikipedia, "Brenner debate"
en.wikipedia.org
- 13Wikipedia, "Metabolic rift"
en.wikipedia.org
- 14Wikipedia, "Racial capitalism"
en.wikipedia.org
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