Marx's Historical Materialism: Understanding Social Change

Marx's Historical Materialism: Core Principles

One of the strongest features of Marx's philosophy is called historical materialism. This is understood as a theory of social evolution, i.e., a theory of historical development. This theory has five key findings:

1. The Material Basis of Human History

   The history of human beings is the history of the material conditions that allow them to build their lives. Human beings are natural and part of nature. However, humans also produce their livelihoods, build their way of life, feed themselves, build their homes, and use tools that transform nature; they therefore produce their material life. This material life is what Marx called the economic process of production and exchange. Historical materialism maintains that other aspects characterizing a historical moment—the social structure, political history, and the history of ideas—can be explained by the production process at the time.

2. Production Modes: Relations and Forces

   The mode of economic production and exchange of a given historical moment is characterized by determined production relations and productive forces.

   Relations of Production

   In each historical period, a social structure determines how work is organized to produce and how the wealth produced is distributed, establishing the rules governing property. Examples include the feudal mode of production. This means that specific legislative and legal institutions, social powers, and forms of ownership organize work and distribute wealth.

   Productive Forces

   In each historical period, certain productive forces exist. These include a workforce (producers), skills that can be applied to production, and organizational capabilities used in coordinating work or improving the division of labor. Productive forces and production relations are not independent; they correspond to each other in every historical period.

3. The Engine of Social Revolution

   The relationship between productive forces and production relations carries within it the seeds of change, social revolution, and the transition from one mode of production to another. Productive forces evolve within a system of production relations that has encouraged them. But there comes a time when property relations and existing institutions prevent or limit the development of the productive forces they were creating. This leads to a period of social revolution that eventually replaces existing property and other institutions with those better suited to new forms of production.

4. Class Struggle: The Manifestation of Contradiction

   The motor of history, the contradiction between productive forces and production relations, manifests in the class struggle. Here, 'class' means a social group formed by those in a similar position within a mode of production. When productive forces come into conflict with the relations of production, a social class emerges whose development is no longer allowed by existing property relations, social structure (legal, political, etc.). At that point, the new class comes into open conflict with the dominant class, which it will sooner or later overcome. The duration of this period of social change, more or less brief, depends on human initiative and the dissemination of this understanding of their own situation, class consciousness.

5. Historical Stages and the End of Capitalism

   The history of class struggles is an evolving series, consisting of a succession of modes of production, the last of which is bourgeois society. This society is reaching the point where it will be surpassed. There are a number of stages or phases in the history of the modes of production: the primitive communal stage, the slave mode of production, the feudal mode of production, and the bourgeois or capitalist mode of production. The latter is also producing a development of productive forces that exceed its limits, or, put another way, is developing a class (the proletariat) that conflicts with the existing social order and will eventually destroy it. Historical materialism becomes a tool to transform this class into a revolutionary class. This transformative role is one that the publication of the Manifesto aimed to fulfill, detailing the conflict that, according to Marx, will end the bourgeois system.