Now that we have talked about the Marxist theory of knowledge and examined the meaning and function of dialectical materialism, let’s look at how that is applied to studying the historical development of society. Marx called this “the materialist conception of history,” or historical materialism. It is historical materialism that demonstrates the link between dialectical materialism and political economy. Here we have dialectical materialism applied to history.

Before we get into all of the details of historical materialism, let’s take an introductory look at some of the key concepts. This way we can understand how they fit together. After this we can look more closely at them each piece by piece.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously proclaimed that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” This is the main point of historical materialism, but there is a lot to unpack in that statement, and we should spend some time understanding how Marx and Engels arrived at that conclusion and what it means for revolutionaries.

Engels summed it up like this in his speech at the grave of Karl Marx in 1883:

“Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.”

As we’ve said before, Marxism is monistic rather than dualistic, meaning it doesn’t separate matter and thought, but recognizes thought as arising from and dependent upon matter. Our material being determines our consciousness. Before we can think, we must eat. Basically, Marxism understands that human society has always been organized around its tools in the production of its material needs. Each historical period is characterized materially by its forces of production and relations of production. Together these make up the material and economic base of society, the mode of production.

Forces of production include everything we use to fulfill human needs. This includes everything from tools, to factories, alongside land, raw materials, logistical infrastructure, warehouses, offices, retail facilities, restaurants, and so on. The tools and factories make up the instruments of production. The raw materials and resources make up the objects of production. The means of production consist of the instruments and objects of production together. The forces of production also include the living labor of the workers, the agents of production. In early human society, these productive forces were limited mainly to things like stone arrowheads and spear tips for hunting. Now they include highly complex technologies and methods.

Relations of production are the definite social relations that people enter into in order to organize the production of their needs. Production is a social process, based on some degree of a division of labor, and, following the end of primitive communal societies and the rise of the ancient slave societies, division of ownership, or class division. In class society, the means of production and the agents of production are separated, such that a minority of people own the means of production while a much larger majority of people work as the agents of production.

For now, let’s just emphasize that in the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, the forces of production tend to be the principal, or determining aspect. It is the forces of production, that is, the instruments of production together with living labor, acting upon nature, that plays the leading role. However, at times the relations of production may be the principal aspect, hastening or slowing the development of the productive forces.

Corresponding to this economic and material base of society there is also a superstructure of society, made up of a set of repressive and ideological apparatuses whose function is the reproduction of the mode of production. This includes legal systems, the courts and the police, but it also includes cultural institutions, schools, the media, religion and the broad political and philosophical ideas that characterize society. For now, let’s just emphasize that in the contradiction between the base and superstructure, the base is typically the principal aspect. The superstructure arises from the material base, though the superstructure also acts upon the base and reinforces it.

Each historical mode of production is defined by the level of the development of its productive forces and the corresponding relations of production. As the productive forces develop to higher levels, eventually the relations of production that at first encouraged and accelerated their development begin to hold them back, and those relations of production must be changed in order for the productive forces to be able to develop further.

Marx sums this up most succinctly in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

“At a certain stage of development, 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.”

As society’s productive forces developed, so too did the relations of production develop from primitive communalism to the ancient slave societies, and on to feudalism, then capitalism, and from capitalism to socialism. These are the relations of production Marx and Engels identified from their analysis of how they had developed in Europe and how they would continue to develop based on their laws of motion that they drew from that analysis. Each change from one mode of production to the next meant the advancement of the productive forces and the revolutionizing of the relations of production. These changes also created great shifts in the legal, political and ideological superstructure to reinforce the base, demanding changes in legal structures, education, family relations and so on.

Historical materialism exposes the great lie of bourgeois ideology, that capitalism is eternal. It shows us that, on the contrary, it wasn’t always like this, that things have come to be this way as a result of a historical process, and that we can and must change things fundamentally and for the better. Historical materialism is a vast subject, and it will take us some time to do it justice. This article can only serve as a brief introduction to the elements of historical materialism. In our forthcoming articles we will go more deeply into each of these.

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In our last article we saw that Marxism-Leninism bases itself on a materialist worldview. But we saw, at the same time, that materialism as it came to be understood with the rise of bourgeois society was still metaphysical in its method of analysis. At this point, let’s look at the difference between the metaphysical and dialectical method. Then we can better understand how Karl Marx established the philosophical basis of revolutionary science, dialectical materialism.

Metaphysics is a subject of philosophy that really begins, at least in the West, with Aristotle in ancient Greece, and is intended to look at that which lies “beyond the senses” or outside the realm of perceptual experience. Friedrich Engels, in his book Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, calls metaphysics “the old method of investigation and thought…which preferred to investigate things as given, as fixed and stable, a method the relics of which still strongly haunt people’s minds.”

This might seem very abstract, but actually we encounter metaphysical thinking all the time, haunting people’s minds in our movements and forming the basis of all kinds or blind alleys, strategic and tactical missteps, and opportunistic tendencies. For example, reformist thinking is based on a view that social progress can be a process of peaceful, quantitative growth and that no qualitative leap is necessary. This is the view of both bourgeois liberals and the so-called democratic socialists. At the same time, reactionaries of all stripes believe that nothing can, or should, fundamentally change. We encounter lots of folks who peddle the idea that things are the way they are just by accident, rather than as the result of a historical process that brought us to where we are, therefore obscuring the root causes of the current state of things. And of course, many people don’t understand how internal contradictions drive a given process, and thus find themselves unable to navigate those contradictions as they unfold. The dialectical method sweeps aside metaphysical thinking on all of these points and gives us the tools we need to combat it.

Engels goes into all of this at length in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. “To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. …For him, a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to the other.”

Engels goes on to say that “dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin and ending.” We see then that metaphysical materialism stops short of seeing how contradictory forces, both within and without, can change a given thing and even cause things to transform into their opposite. It ignores how matter and ideas affect one another, and indeed can transform into one another, for ideas can become a material force in history when taken up by the masses. We have already seen how this works in our previous articles on the Marxist theory of knowledge and the mass line. Marxist-Leninist epistemology is not only materialist, but is fundamentally dialectical.

So much for metaphysics. Let’s look more closely at dialectics. Like metaphysics, dialectics too has its roots in ancient philosophy. Socrates and Plato were both famous for their dialectical method. They believed that when two contradictory arguments were set against each other, reason could allow for a higher understanding to be reached. Later, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel took this idea further in developing his philosophy of dialectical idealism. It was Hegel who first systematized the dialectic. To put it as simply as possible, Hegel argued that there was a dialectical process of historical progression toward Reason where one thing is contradicted by another, leading to their sublation, or overcoming. Often this is described in terms of Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis, with the synthesis carrying forward some remainder as the thesis and antithesis are both overcome in something qualitatively new.

Marx and Engels understood that within Hegel’s dense, idealist system, there was an important key to understanding historical and social change. Hegel understood contradiction to be inherent to progress. Marx took the Hegelian dialectic and put it on a materialist basis: “With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”

The materialist inversion of the Hegelian dialectic means that Marx and Engels started with the material conditions of human beings as they worked to satisfy their material needs. Human society, they saw, has always been organized around its tools, and the productive relations arising from that. From that they understood the historical development of classes and of class struggle as the motive force of history. They illuminated how classes and class struggle drive forth the contradictions in any given historical period, leading towards revolution and advancement towards a new and higher stage, leading to new contradictions, ever onward.

Finally, this brings us to another important point. It should be noted that Hegel’s idealist dialectic is teleological, which means it has a fixed end or “final cause” that everything is being drawn towards. For Hegel this is the actualization of God in the world through Reason, the “End of History.” The materialist dialectic of Marxism has no such teleological end. From a dialectical materialist viewpoint, there is no reason to believe that there will ever be a time when all contradictions are resolved and there is no more struggle and thus no more progress.

By applying the “rational kernel” of the Hegelian dialectic to modern materialism the laws that govern social and historical change are finally revealed. Engels lists these laws of the dialectic as follows: the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, the law of the transformation of quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation. All of these may be summed up as particular aspects of dialectical contradiction. In our forthcoming articles we will examine each of these in greater detail before advancing to an analysis of Historical Materialism, which is Marx’s application of the materialist dialectic to history.

See our full series on Marxist-Leninist theory here.

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