Historical Materialism

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM. This phrase designates what Marx himself called the “guiding thread” of what has become, in effect, “Marxist Studies” at large. Unlike most previous theories of society, Historical Materialism considers the means of production and the social relations of production within the context of the natural world to be the fundamental basis of organized society. It further postulates that the relationships and values generated by the production process determine the “social, political, and intellectual life process in general.” Within the development of the forces of production, runs the theory, contradictions increasingly divide society at large into classes and prepare the conditions for the next phase. In capitalism, class society reaches its ultimate stage of development. The proletariat, carrying in itself the legacy of all human development, stands next in line to take control and, in so doing, to abolish the tyranny of economics over common life.

While accepting the general outlines of this theory, different elements of the US Left have emphasized its importance to a greater or lesser degree and one aspect over another. During the early era, roughly 1870 to 1890, eclecticism ran rampant. For approximately the next thirty years, the “scientific” materialism of the Second International blended comfortably with the crude materialism of grass-roots radicals. The “dialectical materialism” or “diamat” developed after Lenin’s death, especially but not only by the Russians, added the role of the Party as scientifically guaranteed to lead humanity toward the next and climactic stage of civilization.

Among German Americans in the early days, Ferdinand Lassalle easily ranked with Marx as a champion of labor vision, and the Vormärz poets’ lyric idealism held no small influence. The Communist Manifesto, clarion call to revolution, had far more effect than Capital for some time to come. Native-born Americans of the “revolutionary socialist” faction most thoroughly dedicated to class struggle occasionally drew their inspiration directly from idealist sources. For example, Burnette Haskell, formulator of anarcho-syndicalism and editor of the 1880s San Francisco-based newspaper the Truth, pointed repeatedly to the relentless dialectical development of history. Haskell’s key collaborator, Joseph R. Buchanan, editor of the Denver Labor Enquirer, relied more characteristically upon the cruel realities of frontier labor and the degradation of the American republic to spell out an insurrectionary conclusion. Utopians of the Bellamy Nationalist and successive movements freely acknowledged Marx but in proposing a characteristically American-style voluntary escape from history made a decisive judgment of their own upon the theory’s efficacy and the possibility of mass enlightenment. William Morris, widely read in the circles around The Comrade (1901-1905), gave his devotees clues to overcoming the intrusion of capitalism upon humanity.

During the era to follow, popularization of doctrine predominated in virtually every quarter. The rise of American social science coincided with the translation of European socialist classics, above all the pamphlet-length excerpt Socialism, Utopian and Scientific from Engels’s Anti-Dühring (1893). Engels’s pamphlets, upheld by Daniel De Leon as the key source of “scientific socialism,” provided an open sesame to popular explanation and also reduction. Among English-language socialists in particular, the local study class became a medium for teaching the “science of society,” Lewis Henry Morgan to Karl Kautsky. Behind the study club stood the richly didactic, colloquial explanation of social exploitation and inevitable economic decline in the pages of the Appeal to Reason and its many less-popular counterparts. Heavily proletarian immigrant movements tended to emphasize the reality of the daily class struggle over the finer points of doctrine. Yet even here the goal of workers’ education remained.

More detailed and controversial discussion of materialism failed to elicit wide interest. The International Socialist Review, founded in 1900 with social science enthusiast A. M. Simons at its helm, brought the prestige of German theorists to Americans firsthand. There and in the pages of the Yiddish Zukunft the details of historical materialism received a most vigorous debate: Did the theory apply equally to all individuals or nations? Did it reconcile the question of European and American colonialism as the absorption of backward societies into more materially advanced ones? What application could be given to art and science? But such discussions appealed largely to intellectuals.

By the approach of World War I, the theoretical solidity of Engelsian doctrine had been breached from several angles. Feminists and bohemians raised up idealist theorists and theories more akin to utopianism than to Marxism. Immigrants in particular faced the ambivalent possibilities of nationalism for their flocks, and the limits of generalized Marxism to interpret the danger of world powers dominating lesser peoples. The Russian Revolution at first glance seemed to deny the efficacy of historical materialism by projecting a backward nation into the first self-proclaimed socialist society.

Leninism affixed a patchwork solution to the theoretical dilemmas, never fully restoring the simple class content or teleology of the older model. Amended to encompass the struggle of the super-exploited races and peoples, “dialectical materialism” or “dimat,” as it had been renamed, no longer spoke consistently or convincingly of the “advanced” proletariat’s central role in bringing world revolution. The Soviet Union, in theory exempt from class conflicts if not historical materialism, nevertheless obviously underwent traumatic struggles to raise up its own forces of production by which, logically, its course should not be determined. Leninism’s “vanguard party” concept and its affirmation of the Russian Revolution as the central event in modern history provided a solution so convincing to a generation of revolutionaries that every alternative party in the field of Leninism accepted essentially the same philosophical propositions.

The unmatched example of the Russian Revolution, however constrained or corrupted according to different theories, continued to reign triumphant in the Left so long as capitalism seemed on a downward economic spiral. The renewal of capitalism after World War II snapped the last barrier against the collapse of historical materialism as an all-sufficient explanation. Attempts to extend historical materialism into a true world-system, with the “proletariat” in effect the Third World population at large, brought Leninist theory to a conclusion but did nothing to restore expectations for the proletariat in the most highly mechanized nations. Substitutions of a revolutionary peasant army or peasantry at large whether China, Ghana or Vietnam, validated one aspect of the theory at the expense of other aspects.

The effect of these revolutionary developments, combined with the Khrushchev revelations of 1956 and the character of newer mass movements, above all civil rights, in the United States, all tended to discredit theoretical assumptions that had remained dominant in the American Left since 1917. Unlike such European heretics as Cornelius Castoriadis or Jürgen Habermas, American Marxists drawn to such questions did not generally confute historical materialism outright or seek to substitute technology for production. They simply abandoned the particulars of historical materialism.

By the later 1960s, discussions of contradictions centered in capitalism’s “superstructure” drew alike upon Gramsci and Althusser for justification in setting aside traditional historical-materialist analyses, affirming a wider and more eclectic view of class, race, and gender exploitation in whatever studies were pursued. Culture and religion began therefore to be viewed as highly significant factors that could essentially be autonomous from economics. Not even the radical economists of New Left vintage looked to a definitive capitalist breakdown as the central source for socialist transformation, although James O’Connor’s theories of welfare state exhaustion hinted at a similar conclusion.

Not surprisingly, as the older socialist organizations rooted in traditional theory tended to diminish in importance, their own theorists tended to de-emphasize the old theories of historical materialism save in the most general sense of world-capitalist crisis, without drawing heretical conclusions. More generally, Left groups’ concentration upon peasant-based revolutionary movements or governments abroad, and imperialism or racism and sexism and environmental degradation at home, precluded the older theoretical framework. While labor-oriented activities therefore continued, especially among sectors accessible to organization and reform, deeper theory became increasingly a minor concern. For the moment, the legacy of “Western Marxism” of Lukacs, Gramsci and others came to be posed against a presumably cruder non-Western version, and most definitely against claims that science, too, could or should be seen through a Marxist perspective.

Within the academic world, historical materialism remained alive as a conditioning factor for radical history, sociology, literary theory, and even psychology. Indeed, certain trends in the transition to poststructuralism and postmodernism raised up explicitly historical materialist readings of “culture” in the broadest anthropological sense. Increasingly, as in the writings of Michael Buroway, Marxist theory even enjoyed a measure of revival in something like its original form. For the most part, historical materialism served as a rallying point and an antidote to the more extreme idealism of theory inspired by the apoliticized, French-oriented intellectual avant-garde. By the late 1990s the waning of the postmodern paradigm and the rapid growth of extreme class divisions across the globe returned Marxism to a measure of popularity. Marxist environmentalists, especially those of the journal CNS, edited by James O’Connor, found important new uses for Marxist intellectual traditions.

It was this last point explored convincingly during the early decades of the twenty-first century. The increasing accessibility and discussion of writings on science by Marx and Engels in their notebooks and correspondence met the eagerness of a branch of thinkers. At the same time, the volume of discussion about the writings of Marx and Engels in their own time increased dramatically, filling the pages of Left journals old and new, as they had never previously. It would be impossible to summarize the richness of the discussion except that a rising enthusiasm for assorted topics met the sharply rising number of young Americans interested in socialism and supportive of a dramatic social change.

John Bellamy Foster and his milieu around Monthly Review made a forceful argument for a recuperation of Engels and the “dialectic of nature.” Curiously, this marked a return of sorts to the mostly hidden side of “Diamat.” Marxist historians of science, Moses Finley among others, had been discussing this topic in the pages of Science and Society from the journal’s origin its late 1930s origins through the 1950s and beyond. The discussion took on new weight in the ecological crisis at hand. The British-based journal Historical Materialism, launched in 1995, and sponsoring conferences in New York as well, and with a book series of its own, marks a new note in the use of the phrase, but topics are sufficiently broad-based to conclude that “HM” has become an all-inclusive phrase for the Marxist view of socialism’s history and its future.

Buhle, Paul. Marxism in the United States. New York: Verso, 2017 edition.

Buroway, Michael. The Politics of Production. London: Verso, 1985.

Foster, John Bellamy. Marx’s Ecology. New York: Monthly Review, 2000.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins, and John Bellamy Foster, eds. In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1996.