Understanding Historical Materialism

A review of key essays from Frederich Engels

Last year I decided to discontinue my usual format of book reviews. The book reviews I conducted (which can be found here) always consisted of a bundled review of the last three books I read. This helped me keep track of my objective of reading a book a month while also giving my readers a preview into the things I was reading in a quarterly digest. However, some reader feedback pushed me away from that model towards one where I review each book I read individually.

Well, for my first book related post of the year, I’m throwing all of that aside. I’m doing this for two reasons. First, I have yet to finish my first self-assigned book for the year, Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. The reason for this is that it’s a behemoth of a book at ~750 pages which I am still going through. The second reason is that since I have taken up full-time employment I have opted to not carry around Russell’s brick of a book with me on my commute. So, as a substitute, I have been reading from a collection of Marxist essays compiled by Lewis S. Feuer into a book titled Marx & Engels Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy.

The book contains important texts and letters as well as excerpts from Marx and Engels’ larger works making it a handy reader for those looking to get into Marxism.

As a rule, I usually avoid buying collected works. Mostly because the books are less collections per se, but rather collections of excerpts. This means that what excerpts are selected are usually at the whim of the editor and their taste and judgment be it good or poor. For this reason, I usually just buy the full texts themselves. However, this collected works included several essays, in full, hard to come across on their own, and deal more with Marxist philosophy than with Marxist economics.

As such, this book has been accompanying me on my commute to the office and I have been able to read some of the key essays it presents including:

On Historical Materialism by Fredrich Engels

Socialism: Scientific and Utopian by Fredrich Engel

Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical Philosophy by Fredrich Engels

Critique of the Gotha Program by Karl Marx

It is the first three essays that this post is concerned with. Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, a very important read, will be the subject of a later post of mine, because it does not discuss the subject topic Historical Materialism, and warrants its own critique.

Some background

The importance of the first three essays is that they were the first and only to be published within the lifetimes of the two thinkers. Of the three, Socialism: Scientific and Utopian is probably the most important one as it is the most related to the revolutionary practices of the time.

It was written specifically to be distributed towards a wide audience which makes it a much easier read than Marx’s more voluminous works which, as today, mostly collect dust in impressive-looking libraries to be dusted off by academics and those with a lot of time on their hands (like me). More than that, it was meant to summarize the ideas found in the yet published The German Ideology which, published after the death of both Marx and Engels, today constitutes the most comprehensive account of their philosophy.

So, if reading this summary or Socialism: Scientific and Utopian does not quench your thirst on the topic, The German Ideology is where you want to head next.

What is Historical Materialism?

Most people associate Marxism with its anti-capitalistic fervour. Although Marxism is anti-capitalistic it is not so on moral grounds. Marx was not concerned with concepts of greed as much as he was with pointing out that exploitation is a function of capitalism. (The focus on the moral elements of Marxism came out as an aesthetic byproduct of communist propaganda, a way to distil the Marxist message.) Marx was an anti-capitalist on the grounds of class warfare and the scientific fact that the proletariat — the working class, was both the largest and the producing class and that, just as previously, past oppressing classes (feudal lords and kings) were overthrown once they outlasted their usefulness, so too will the bourgeois class be overthrown.

This became the central theme of Marxism as stated in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto, that: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Class struggle being the struggle to advance the material conditions of a segment of society on account of the development of means of production, that is, the means in which our material needs, food, clothing, social enjoyment, are met.

It is how these means develop that dictate not only how classes are formed, but which classes come into conflict with each other and how. It is this conflict/development of the means of production that is the engine of history and it is the job of Historical Materialism to show how these conflicts developed and, more importantly, how they will develop in the future.

The ‘Birth Pangs’ of Historical Materialism

Before we can understand how Historical Materialism functions we need to delve into a bit of history of philosophy. This is where Engels comes in.

Since the beginning of time, there has been an obsession with trying to understand what truth is. This search extended itself into all things, what does it mean to be just? what does it mean to be a good person? Is there a soul? How can we know what we know?

All of these questions sought absolute answers. Most ancient philosophy quickly provided such answers. The plants are godly entities (Plato), a good man is the mean of vices (Aristotle), Justice is knowing your place (Socrates). These belong to the philosophy of idealism and they were best presented in later years by Kant and his concept of the categorical imperative. It is by pursuing these “truths” that we can become complete.

Then, however, came Hegel. A German philosopher who (re)introduced the idea of dialectics. That there is no ‘Truth’ but that history is set in motion by a process of contradiction that seek to resolve themselves only to be met by more contradictions. Engels describes this in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical Philosophy saying that:

Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it had attained.

Engels goes on to say that the reason we have had absolute idealists is due to our innate need to solve all contradictions. However, even if we were to take the perspective of the absolute idealists and imagined that we could reach that state, we would still find a contradiction in their theory.

With all philosophers it is precisely the “system” which is perishable; and for the simple reason that it springs from an imperishable desire of the human mind — the desire to overcome all contradictions. But if all contradictions are once and for all disposed of, we shall have arrived at so-called absolute truth — world history will be at an end. And yet it has to continue, although there is nothing left for it to do — hence, a new, insoluble contradiction.

Hegel then, completely upset philosophy with his dialectics, his:

great basic thought that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of readymade things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away, in which, in spite of all seeming accidentally and of all temporary retrogression, a progressive development asserts itself in the end — this great fundamental thought has, especially since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness that in this generality it is now scarcely ever contradicted.

But Hegel, being a product of his time was also an idealist, although he didn't believe in absolute truth he still thought that it was ideas that drove history forward, that an individual first perceives of an idea and then sets out to enact it. Never perfectly due to material limitations. Engels summarizes this by saying that:

To him [Hegel], the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and their evolution were only the realized pictures of the “Idea”, existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of things in the world.

This is completely opposite of how the world really functions. Engels argues that it is our material conditions that fuel our thoughts and ideas that then interact with the material world “ It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. This matter is the substratum of all changes going on in the world… Every human passion is a mechanical movement, which has a beginning and an end.”. For even if we want to take the concept that ideas fuel the world it is impossible for them alone to shape it as a person needs to materially interact with the world around them. Furthermore, it is not ideas that fuel our interaction but our material needs themselves! Engels summarizes this in Socialism: Scientific and Utopian by saying:

The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.

The Historical Materialism of Historical Materialism

In proper scientific fashion, Engels goes to great lengths to show how the development of Historical Materialism had itself to go through the processes of history for it to develop.

Historical Materialism did not simply develop because someone (Marx) ‘thought it up’. Its birth depended on the changing material forces around it, namely the scientific advances (mostly in natural science) brought about during the enlightenment that allowed for the confirmation that life is not cyclical as previously thought so by ancient philosophers.

Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution.

It is nature that showed us that things don’t occur in isolation but they do so in complex systems. This has to be discovered first before Hegel or Marx could come. Furthermore, Engels takes painstaking steps to show how even the materialist philosophy evolved until it reached Marx.

Putting the History in Historical Materialism

So how does one get from Historical Materialism to Communism? The steps are not as far as they seem.

By locating the engine of history in the struggle to meet the material needs of individuals, it becomes easier to present history and the important events that have shaped it succinctly, as well as to project what the next evolution in history will be.

Engels break these down into three sections. First, Medieval society with the classes it established through violence as clans, kingdoms, etc. Fought for access to means of production and exchange (money and land). Second, into the bourgeois phase where, after the advancement of science and the growth of a merchant and capitalist class felt limited by the existence of royalty and eventually overthrew them. Third, “ just as, at a definite stage of its development, manufacture came into conflict with the feudal order of production, so now large-scale industry has already come into conflict with the bourgeois order or production established in its place.”

Each of these stages is accompanied by their modes of production. Under Feudalism, the means of production were individual, socialized only through guilds but even then, the tools themselves remained for the individual and what was produced was produced by them and exchanged based on their will, even in the fields. With industrialization, however, the means of production were socialised and their productive forces multiplied. This is what created the conflict between the power structures of feudal lords and kingdoms and those who owned the productive forces/means of production. These means and the conflict started developing during the Renaissance and materialised into open conflict including conflict against the church both at the level of the kings and the owning class. This was the first step of the evolution until even kings got in the way of the owning class.

The socialisation of the means of production meant that those doing the work no longer owned the means with which the work was done. Thus, the capitalist class was born as was alienation. Workers still were the ones producing, but they were alienated from what they made. What more, now that we are able to produce at mass levels, problems with overproduction result in the collapse of the economy and the suffering of the producing class. “The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces, its own creations. It is no longer able to turn all this mass of means of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of subsistence, available laborers, all the elements of production and of general wealth, are present in abundance. But “abundance becomes the source of distress and want” (Fourier), because it is the very thing that prevents the transformation of the means of production and subsistence into capital”.This presents the question, what is the function of the bourgeois class? It is this conflict that now propels us to the next stage of history.

It is this history that is explored in full in Socialism: Scientific and Utopian and summarized by Engels in the end. A summary I present in full although unexpertly reproduced above.