The Case for Historical Materialism

We all probably know that one of Marx and Engels’ great accomplishments is often said to be the creation of something called historical materialism, or in their own phrase, “the materialist conception of history.” What is this conception? What is the particularity of this approach to history, and how is it connected to revolutionary change?

In this essay, written for Kasama, Eddy Laing seeks to answer these questions, using not only the works of Marx and Engels, but more recent findings and research in anthropology and social sciences.

This is the first of three parts.

Why historical materialism matters, 1

by Eddy Laing

At the core of Marxism is the methodology of historical materialism (HM), which “regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence.” 1 As developed by Marx and Engels, the dialectical materialist conception of history is not just an interpretation of the world; it is a guide to active transformation and “in its essence critical and revolutionary.”2

Of course, it can be argued that any study of history is necessarily a study of social development. Unlike histories defined by the acts of presidents, generals, bankers or other elites, and measured against the Idea, or Moment or other ideological abstractions, historical materialism proceeds from an analysis of how society as a whole functions, “starting with the material production of life itself and comprehending the form of intercourse connected with and created by this mode of production.”3 In other words, historical materialism is a study of societies as they really are — as diverse and complex assemblies of people with various needs and aspirations. In order to do that, we need to examine society in all its stages and component reciprocal actions; how people make their lives, enact the state (laws, governance), and conduct themselves ideologically through religion, philosophy, ethics, morality, art, literature, music, etc. These activities and expressions are in fact social practices and, taken together, form the cultural matrix of the given society.

In 1848, Europe was still emerging from the centuries-long hold of feudalism and monarchism. From that vantage point, Marx and Engels had a palpable sense of the old social formations — dying but not yet dead — as well as the newly emerging ones, especially a rising class of proletarians for whom social revolution was on the immediate agenda.4 Thus, Marx and Engels developed their framework in active opposition to the idealism which, then as now, reinforced the dominant narratives of the day. And it was through that struggle that they were able to stand Hegel’s dialectical method ‘right side up’ and develop a science of the general laws of motion of the external world and of human thought, so that the real world was approached as the source of ideas, and not the other way around.5

HM proceeds from the hypothesis that our social being produces our consciousness; how we think and what we think are construed from our collaborations and communication with others. We devise our ways of life through networks of economic, political, and ideological social relationships, which we usually call ‘society.’ This sociality is a defining characteristic of humans; we could not exist, much less create culture, outside our social practices. Furthermore, the reciprocal interaction of our thinking and being is transformative; through our social practices we intentionally — and unintentionally in some cases — change our conditions of life, including how and what we think.

In this way, we produce our history, not as a recurring series of equivalent events, but as ongoing transformative experiences. Thus, human cultural history is oriented; it is a continuum of social practices that intersect in a complex matrix and which extend from and build upon collective past practices. How we live today is not how people lived two hundred or two thousand or two hundred thousand years ago. Neither are societies identical; each contains its own specificity and history. That said, how we live today is based in some part on how we have lived in the past and societies often share features that are built from similar social practices. An analogy can be drawn from biology: natural history is oriented in its evolution in that new species derive from species, body plans and organs that already exist, not according to a metaphysical system of phylogenetic progress. Furthermore, as biology, geology, astrophysics, and other sciences have subsequently shown, all life on this planet and all matter in the universe have histories too.

Orientation — the continuum of formative practices — does not preclude accident or obviate contingency. Social development is inexorable through time, but not in regard to its structure. Societies are what we make them to be, but we operate “under circumstance directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”6 Societies arise according to specific conditions of material life, and as history demonstrates, they continue to undergo various subtle and dramatic changes over time: technologies are invented and become obsolete, forms of symbolization are transformed and deprecated, shared knowledge (oral or written) of the world is gained, forgotten or destroyed. As history also demonstrates emphatically, when the functional conditions of life of enough members of a society come into sharp conflict with how that society is directed or organized, resolutions are found in climactic and sudden events, often pitting one section against another, or pitting all against nature. Mass migrations, epidemics, wars and revolutions are all examples of resolving events.

Marx and Engels first presented their ‘materialist conception of history’ in polemics against the ‘idealist conception of history’ espoused by certain academic Hegelians7 and Ludwig Feuerbach. Starting with those polemics and specifically with The German Ideology, written in 1847, historical materialism provides a bright red thread running through their subsequent decades of collaboration, as demonstrated in their many practical applications: The Manifesto of the Communist Party; Capital; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Boneparte; The Civil War in France; Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State; and their many other investigations of history, contemporary society and the struggle for socialism.

Since all scientific theories are developed from fact, my intent here is to illustrate the validity of HM by drawing on the empirical evidence of human social history: anthropology, psychology, archaeology, and other social sciences. Marx’s own study of the history of law and philosophy provided him with a starting point (e.g. the ideological and political superstructure of societies) for developing this theory, and his extensive study of capitalism, using England as its primary data set, is summarized in his famous critique.8 However, the data available today is more extensive than that obtainable in 1847 or 1867.

I do not presume to exhaust this subject, which is not possible in any event. Neither am I interested in compiling a set of rules or formulas or mechanistic ‘just so’ statements. What I do hope to accomplish is a cogent explanation of key theses within the HM methodology and an exploration of certain misconceptions, in the spirit of “revolutionizing the existing world, of practically coming to grips with and changing the things found in existence.”9

Humans as Social Animals

More than a simple statement of fact, we are animals and so we have a natural history. Our species, Homo sapiens, is a sub-set of the Hominidae family within the Primates order. We share a common ancestral species with and are most closely related to other hominids — chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Those animals (with the possible exception of Borneo orangutans) as well as the Old World monkeys and some other primates are social-banding creatures from which we can infer that earliest members of our species also lived that way. Early humans in Eastern Africa very likely lived in groups that jointly gathered food, secured shelter and biologically reproduced. It is also likely that early human bands observed some form of internal hierarchy aligned with age and sex. Based on ethnographic analogy, it is reasonable to suggest that the exploitation of female and juvenile labor emerged early as expressions of such a hierarchy,10, 11, 12 and rudimentary manifestations of exploitive practice have been observed among collateral species 13,14,15,16 (e.g. adult males aggressively taking food that has been gathered by females or juveniles).

Successful population groups are by definition those that solve the problems of maintenance and reproduction of the group, which of course takes place in relation to the group’s environment. This is a necessary quality for biological evolution, and it is a necessary quality of social evolution.17 Functional groups are able to cooperate and are multi-generational. They have a need to communicate and they have learned behavior that can be shared among peers and with the younger generation. It is in these functions that we can begin to discriminate the capabilities of humans from those of other hominids. Very significantly, comparative observations of humans and other great apes show that the human infants display a capacity for understanding shared intentions. In other words, as part of our cognitive development we learn — before we can speak — that other humans are agents with whom we can cooperate.18,19,20,21

It is in the course of cooperation that we learn vocabulary and other cultural information. As everyday events show us, speech acquisition is an on-going social practice. We are continually encountering — and inventing — new words and new meanings for words. While infant vocalization may begin as signaling, it rather quickly evolves into something more. We are not learning a set of signals when we acquire speech.22 Rather, our speech is comprised of a logically formed and extensible system of symbols.23 Here again, we are the only animal known to be capable of symbolizing and symbolic recursion.24 Taken together, these capabilities enable an expandable matrix of social practices, which reciprocally comprise intra-group social relationships.

“The production of life, both of one’s own labour and of the fresh life in procreation, now appears as a twofold relation: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relation — social in the sense that it denotes the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a ‘productive force’.”25

Modern society has developed — over several thousand generations — from those beginnings. As our social history illustrates, those specific capacities do not prescribe one type or direction for our cultural evolution. Our capacity for shared intentionality, for example, has not obviated social conflict; our ability to create tools produced Zyklon B and the H-bomb. Social contradictions do not result simply because we are not as ‘wise’ as our taxon sapiens suggests, but they do demonstrate the innovative variability inherent in our transformative actions.

Thought and Social Practice

The phenomenon of consciousness has been the object of speculation — what is it, how does it happen — throughout written history. A well-known Zen koan frames the subject-object question by asking whether the dreamer is a man or a butterfly, but an entomologist might point out that the Lepidoptera nervous system is too primitive to support memory. Historical materialism, developed in opposition to philosophical idealism, answers this question directly: it is not human consciousness that produces our being; it is our social being which produces our consciousness.

This statement should not be interpreted to mean only that the brain is an organ for thought or memory, or that thoughts are simply biochemical signals transmitted through a central nervous system. Although it is required for and enables thinking and memory, the physiology of the brain is not thinking. Brains do not produce symbols or memories from within. Thinking proceeds from interactions with others. The dialectical materialist psychologist Lev Vygotsky and his colleagues conducted path-breaking investigations of cognition during the revolutionary 1920s in Russia, demonstrating that cognitive ability develops through social interaction.26 Human infants learn how to learn through dialogic exchange with others. Thus, we are not born ‘human’; we are made so through our interactions. We continue to acquire knowledge throughout our lives by internalizing direct and indirect shared experience, through social practices, including those of semiotic mediation — the forms through which we communicate with each other. 27,28,29 In this process, we create our thoughts: as memories of dialogic experiences, as physical perceptions, and through a process of comparison and association that we sometimes experience as an ’inner monologue.’30

This assumes still greater significance when we consider the full history of our species. Humans migrated out from Africa in perhaps several waves, reaching across Asia as well as into Europe, out onto the Pacific, across the Bering Sea, and the length of the Western Hemisphere. This in itself demonstrates a range of transformative and transmitted behaviors that enabled ‘success’ in a tremendously wide range of habitats — from the African savannah to the Arctic tundra, from the Tibetan plateau to the Amazonian basin. While human presence has created habitat opportunities for fellow travelers (rodents and domestic cats are two examples), no other animal has demonstrated such a capacity for adapting to widely different climates and habitat.

Humans have not only responded to the environment, we have learned to remake it. The earliest details of how we learned are lost to the oral histories of the thousands of generations who came before the advent of written language about 5,000 years ago. Relying on their oral folklore our distant ancestors learned to predict climate and seasons, learned to control fire, learned to cultivate plants, learned to domesticate certain mammals, learned to create their own shelter, and with various other assembled skills and affinities eventually stepped into a more settled world; produced by their own hands and minds in dialogue with each other.

An ongoing argument within anthropology for most of the last century has been whether the breadth of human culture has been mainly a process of diffusion — the communication of practices from one group to another — or independent invention responding to specific similar or distinct conditions of life. Writing, for example, is thought to have developed independently in at least two cultures (Mayan and Sumerian) and possibly others (Indus), based on distinct glyphic systems and proto-grammars. Other examples can be inferred from the invention of crop cultivation, for while varieties of the same grains might be transplanted to different locales with similar climate (for example from east to west or vice versa), the same transfer would not be successful when moving longitudinally (south-north) or across elevations (into or out of significantly different climate zones).31 It would appear that both the social, interactive practices of innovation and of interchange are foundational to human cultural history, and have been employed by various — distinct and related — population groups at different times and in different places.32

Notes

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[Abbreviations for multi-volume book sets: MECW = Marx and Engels Collected Works; MESW = Marx and Engels Selected Works; LCW = V.I. Lenin Collected Works]

1 Marx, K. 1967/1867. Capital. Vol. 1. New York. p 29.

2 Capital. Vol. 1. p 29.

3 Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1976/1848. The German Ideology. MECW 5. New York. p 53.

4 Describing 1848, Engels wrote “the Paris uprising found its echo in the victorious insurrections in Vienna, Milan and Berlin; when the whole of Europe right up to the Russian frontier was swept into the movement.” see Marx, K. 1969/1850. The Class Struggles in France. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 189.

5 Capital. Vol. 1. p. 29. See also: Engels, F. 1969/1886. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. MESW Vol. 3. Moscow. esp. Part IV on Marx.

6 Marx, K. 1969/1869. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Boneparte. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 398.

7 German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel was a very strong influence for Marx and other radical thinkers of the day.

8 Capital, Vol. 1. p. 19.

9 The German Ideology. p 38.

10 Moore, J. H. 1977. The Evolution of Exploitation. Critique of Anthropology 2(8): 33-48.

11 Moore, J. H. 1978. The Exploitation of Women in Evolutionary Perspective. Critique of Anthropology 3(9-10): 83-100.

12 Terray, E. and J. S. Kahn. 1979. On Exploitation: Elements of an Autocritique. Critique of Anthropology 4(13-14): 29-39.

13 Brennan, J. and J. Anderson. 1988. Varying responses to feeding competition in a group of rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Primates 29(3): 353-360.

14 Starin, E. D. 2006. Patterns of food transfer in temminck’s red colobus. Aggressive Behavior 32(3): 181-186.

15 Whiten, A. and C. P. van Schaik. 2007. The evolution of animal ‘cultures’ and social intelligence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362(1480): 603-620.

16 Cheney, D., R. Seyfarth, B. Smuts. 1986. Social relationships and social cognition in nonhuman primates. Science 234(4782): 1361-1366.

17 By evolution, I mean simply ‘the change in properties of populations of organisms over time’ as per Ernst Mayr.

18 Tomasello, M. 2001. Cultural Transmission: A View from Chimpanzees and Human Infants. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 32(2): 135-146.

19 Tomasello, M., M. Carpenter, J. Call, T. Behne, and H. Moll. 2005. Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(05): 675-691.

20 Herrmann, E., J. Call, M. V. Hernández-Lloreda, B. Hare, M. Tomasello. 2007. Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis. Science 317(5843): 1360-1366.

21 Tomasello, M. and H. Rakoczy. 2003. What Makes Human Cognition Unique? From Individual to Shared to Collective Intentionality. Mind & Language 18(2): 121-147.

22 Wertsch, J. V. 1985. Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind. Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press.

23 Vygotsky, L. 1986. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MIT Press. p. 68-95.

24 Hauser, M. D., N. Chomsky, et al. 2002. The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve? Science 298(5598): 1569-1579.

25 The German Ideology. p 43.

26 Vygotsky. Thought and Language. p. 68-95.

27 Moll, H. and M. Tomasello. 2007. Cooperation and human cognition: the Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362(1480): 639-648.

28 Fernyhough, C. 1996. The dialogic mind: A dialogic approach to the higher mental functions. New Ideas in Psychology 14(1): 47-62.

29 Wertsch, J. V. and P. Tulviste. 1992. L. S. Vygotsky and Contemporary Developmental Psychology. Developmental Psychology 28(4): 548-557.

30 Vygotsky. Thought and Language. p. 210-256.

31 Several examples are discussed in Diamond, J. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York, W.W. Norton.

32 For tens of thousands of years this may also have involved interchange between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, another, somewhat earlier species of humans who also populated areas of Africa and Eurasia. c.f. Mellars, P. 1988. The Origins and Dispersal of Modern Humans. Current Anthropology 29(1): 186-188.

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