Historical materialism

Production has been proven to be a central concept in historical materialism by the division of labour that reflects the power structure of society. This is class dominated in the interests of the bourgeoisie whilst the proletariat does most of the work.  People then see each other as competition and relate to one another by the amicability of the market. Employer-employee relations are characterised by antagonisms and notions of superiority. Production is always a social process whereby workers have to interact with one another thus affecting the modes of production, which therefore has an impact on the social development of history.

Private property is an important part of production as it not only helps to create alienation but it is also reinforced by it. McLellan points out that private property is ‘the result of the analysis of the concept of externalized labour’. Marx seeks to encourage the disintegration of private property because it embodies the notion of individual wealth. The acquisition of private property becomes the supreme goal of life and therefore ownership becomes crucial and society perceives individuals through the lens of possession. Thus alienation exists due to the loss of control whereby inversion has occurred and people are producing things that harm them and develop a life of their own. Marx’s point here is that alienation is vital to the social process of historical development. We therefore need to undergo the period of capitalism and exploitation so as to bring about revolution, and in due course, communism. Marx and Engels believed that ‘the tasks of socialist and communist construction must await the necessary conditions of historical change’. The proletariat need to be willing and able to overthrow the capitalists, as it requires the entire upheaval of the social and productive forces. Marx’s claim was that the dominant ideas and theories serve the interests of the ruling class, and that the bourgeoisie use their ownership of the means of production as a way of exploiting the workers. This happens because the proletariat are economically dependent on selling their labour to the capitalists, who in turn make their living on the surplus product. This, according to Marx, would create class conflict.

The issue of class conflict is important in understanding historical materialism, as it is also related to production. Marx’s definition of ‘class’ is different to the way in which we understand the concept today. We may see class as representing a person’s status in society. However, Marx defined it as a person’s relation to the means of production (e.g. raw materials, factories, land). He distinguished this from the relations of production i.e. the social relations experienced by those workers behind the production forces. Together these become the mode of production and his argument was that a change in the production forces leads to a wider social change. This is because the production forces keep progressing to a point where they can no longer develop any further and the point comes when the production relations become a blockage. Therefore a revolution occurs such as in the 17th Century Feudal system where production was no longer expanding. The Bourgeoisie proposed new modes of production and their success is what lead them to seize power. This progress is what Marx believes to have determined history and is another reason why the concept of production is so central to historical materialism.

Marx believed that there is a historical pattern showing how the division of labour has altered over time because history has been determined by class struggle. He outlined four stages characterised by different class structures, each being a result of revolution in reaction to the previous stage. The first stage is known as ‘Primitive Communism’ where conflict arose in tribal, underdeveloped society due to the lack of materials. This progressed into a ‘Slavery’ stage where the division of labour becomes more complicated and takes a political form. New hostilities existed between the town and country and between citizens and slaves within towns. This period was replaced by the ‘Feudal’ state consisting of landowners and peasants. Its political form was the monarchical state until the bourgeois revolution (predominantly instigated in the French Revolution of 1789) brought about ‘Capitalism’: a liberal democratic state entailing free trade and private ownership. In Capital Marx maintains that ‘the economic structure of capitalistic society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former.’ These stages in the development of history have taken the form of different ownership whereby conflicts that develop eventually destroy the modes of production. The ‘existing class relations begin to act as a constraint on the further development of the material forces of production and revolutions occur’. Thus history is ultimately about patterns of ownership, again proving that production is central to historical materialism.

If we are to continue along this theory of history, Marx believed that capitalism would also lead to conflicting interests between social classes and would be replaced with socialism and in turn, communism. Roemer states that ‘history… necessarily eliminates the various forms of exploitation, in a certain order, until communism is reached’. In other words, each system points to its own demise.  His argument was that capitalism creates inequality in society and oppresses the proletariat who are socially marginalized and completely at the mercy of economical forces. Marx believed that people were brainwashed into greed by capitalism and that this could be overcome by a proletarian revolution. A revolution can happen only at the right point in the development of social history and this would happen when the capitalist relations of production cease to be efficient. The classes would become increasingly polarised and the proletariat would rise up against the bourgeoisie. Cooperative production would give the proletariat the strength to defeat employers therefore no one elite would be able to control society. This revolution would represent the end of the pre-history and the beginning of rational history where humans are in control of their own lives.

Some critiques argue that it is not the means of production that provide the elites with power, but those who are in a position of governmental power. This is evident in that there are still elites within Communist systems, which is perhaps why Communist states have been overthrown by Western democracies. Instead of being dominated by capitalists the masses are ruled by a bureaucratic elite. There also exists a growing middle class consisting of those people in society who are neither the workers or the capitalists. One example is the manager of a business who does not strictly sell his labour but also does not reap the profits. This means that the idea of the communist state is not popular because the individual proletarian worker in a capitalist society is unwilling to abolish capitalist domination. He believes that someday he will become an owner in the modes of production and that bourgeois control of society will then be to his own advantage. This is where the opposing classes clash: the bourgeoisie will seek to prevent this from happening by imposing repetitive tasks upon their workers so as to prevent them from becoming skilled enough to become economically independent. The problem with the theory of a growing middle class is that it varies between different societies. For example there is a dominant middle class population evident in Britain but in the US the middle class appears to be declining.

Social change is essentially the outcome of a fresh set of contradictions replacing the former. However although production may be a central concept in the theory of historical materialism, there are other factors that contribute to social change. Geographical environment can influence the development of society but this only happens on a lengthy timescale, as it would take millions of years for a geographical landscape to change in a way that would dramatically alter the history of man. Population is also relevant when considering the determinants of social change. We would expect the size or density of a country’s population to affect the scale and distribution of the workforce, which has a direct effect on production. If we look at the example of China and the United States, the population of China is 1.3 billion (UN, 2004) in contrast to the US population, which is 294 million (US Census Bureau estimate, 2004). However the political system of the US is probably the most advanced form of social development in the world (as it has reached a very complex form of capitalism) whereas China is back to almost a feudal stage of development, after the failure of communism, despite having such a high-density population. Paradoxically, it ‘now has the world's fastest-growing economy and is undergoing what has been described as a second industrial revolution’. It also shares the same problem of a substantial wealth gap, like the US.

Geographical and population changes are just a few of the issues that might determine social change but in my opinion it is the concept of production that is, indisputably, the most central theme in historical materialism. History has shown that changes in the modes of production inevitably cause alteration to social development. Because nature is forever evolving and these modes of production are constantly changing it is clear that this epoch of capitalism is not infinite. Wolff points out that ‘capitalism is a regime of alienation through and through; spreading from religion, to the state, labour, money, human relations, and even language… Eventually existing society will be replaced by a communist system which ‘transcends’ our alienated state, and this will be achieved by proletariat revolution.’ The theory of historical materialism could be said to be deterministic because everything that happens would be determined by an uninterrupted series of aforementioned incidents. ‘No mysterious miracles or totally random events occur. The principal consequences of this doctrine are that free will… is an illusion, and that the outcomes of all future events have already been determined’.

Marx’s Communist Manifesto suggested a course of action for a proletarian revolution to overthrow capitalism and, eventually, to bring about a classless utopia. He would never have refered to himself as a utopian as he certainly was not an idealist but communism for Marx was the ideal structure of society. He hated everything that capitalism represented. Engels stated in his Dialectics of Nature that ‘we have subdued the forces of nature and pressed them into the service of mankind: we thereby have infinitely multiplied production… And what is the consequence? Increasing overwork and increasing misery of the masses, and every ten years a great crash’. Marx truly believed that society was approaching the next political stage in the history of man and that the fall of the bourgeoisie was inevitable. The proletariat would become conscious of their exploitation and emerge victorious in a revolution that would change the shape of human social history forever. However, in order for this to happen the forces of production need to have stopped developing in line with human initiative to start a revolution. Critiques have dismissed Marx’s theory as having been tried and failed. Personally I think there is still time to progress into communism, especially since the majority of Marx’s ideas are still relevant today. Whether or not communism can ever overthrow Western liberal democracy is unclear. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the one concept that can bring about such a radical historical change is production, which is the reason why it is the central concept to historical materialism.

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