Historical Materialism

Historical materialism (aka. histomat) is the metatheory of societal development that undergirds the Marxist “research programme” on the genesis, structure, and change of social formations, from primitive communism to the advanced communist society of the future. Although Marx himself modestly described the materialist conception of history as the “guiding thread” of his studies, the materialist conception of history is not simply a heuristic tool for the analysis of history, but presupposes and projects a substantive onto-theo-teleological philosophy of history with a practical intent.

Through a cross-reading of Hegel's dialectical philosophy and Feuerbach's materialist anthropology, the young [Page 374]Marx initially developed historical materialism as a philosophical anthropology and only later, from 1845–1846 onwards, as a philosophically informed sociological theory of historical development. Marx outlined the principles of historical materialism in systematic fashion only twice: first, in the first part of The German Ideology (1845–1846) and next in the famous “Preface” to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).

In the Theses on Feuerbach (1845), which Engels published in 1888 as an appendix to one of his own books on German philosophy, Marx presented in shorthand the philosophical-anthropological foundations of the dialectical theory of historical praxis that subsequently will inform his more systematic sociological formulations of historical materialism, as well as the concrete historical research that is built on it. In an unsurpassed attempt to synthesise the materialist tradition of philosophy (from Democritus to Feuerbach) with the dialectical one (from Heraclites to Hegel), he insists with Feuerbach on the sensuous nature of human activity and adopts a materialist position that puts Hegel “back on his feet.” Against Feuerbach he recovers the “rational core” of Hegel and proposes a dialectical correction of Feuerbach's contemplative materialism that is able to take into account the dynamic nature of human activity and history.

While the German Ideology (1845–1846) was left to the “gnawing critique of the mice” and remained unpublished until 1888, the result of the philosophical reflection on—and clarification of—the fundamental principles of historical materialism could immediately be felt in the “mature writings” of Marx, to start with the Communist Manifesto (1848), where the materialist-dialectical conception of history is presented in terms of the history of class struggle. Although class analysis is part and parcel of the materialist conception of history, it is surprisingly absent from the Preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), the locus classicus of historical materialism where Marx ([1859]1971) sums up the general results of his investigations in a justifiably celebrated and controversial passage:

“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis, on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary their social being that determines their consciousness (pp. 20–1).

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