Relevance of Historical Materialism in the 21st Century

OUTLINE
BACKGROUND
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
INTRODUCTION
PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM
FOUNDATIONS FOR HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
RELEVANCE OF THE CONCEPT TO CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
CONCLUSION

BACKGROUND Society is constantly changing. History attempts to catalogue these changes and tries to explain them. But what are the laws that govern historical change? Do such laws even exist?
Just as the evolution of life has inherent laws that can be explained, and were explained, first by Darwin and in more recent times by the rapid advances in the study of genetics, so the evolution of human society has its own inherent laws that were explained by Marx and Engels.
By applying the method of dialectical materialism to history, it is immediately Obvious that human history has its own laws, and that, consequently, it is possible to understand it as a process. The rise and fall of different socio-economic formations can be explained scientifically in terms of their ability or inability to develop the means of production, and thereby to push forward the horizons of human culture, and increase the domination of humankind over nature.
Marxism maintains that the development of human society over millions of years represents progress, but that this has never taken place in a straight line.
The basic premise of historical materialism is that the ultimate source of human development is the development of the productive forces. This is a most important assertion because this alone can permit us to arrive at a scientific conception of history.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
The discovery of the materialist conception of history, or more correctly, the consistent continuation and extension of materialism into the domain of social phenomena, removed the two chief shortcomings in earlier historical theories. In the first place, the latter at best examined only the ideological motives in the historical activities of human beings, without investigating the origins of those motives, or ascertaining the objective laws government the development of the system of social relations, or seeing the roots of these relations in the degree of development reached by material production; in the second place, the earlier theories did not embrace the activities of the masses of the population, whereas historical materialism made it possible for the first time to study with scientific accuracy the social conditions of the life of the masses, and the changes in those conditions. At best, pre-Marxist “sociology” and historiography brought forth an accumulation of raw facts, collected at random, and a description of individual aspects of the historical process. By examining the totality of opposing tendencies, by reducing them to precisely definable conditions of life and production of the various classes of individual aspects of the historical process. By examining the choice of a particular “dominant” idea or in its interpretation, and by revealing that, without exception, all ideas and all the various tendencies stem from the condition of the material forces of production, Marxism indicated the way to an all-embracing and comprehensive study of the process of the rise, development, and decline of socio-economic systems. People make their own history but what determines the motives of people, of the mass of people; that is, what is the sum total of all these clashes in the mass of human societies? What are the objective conditions of production of material life that form the basis of all man’s historical activity? What is the law of development of these conditions? To all these Marx drew attention and indicated the way to a scientific study of history as a single process which, with all its immense variety and contradictoriness, is governed by definite laws.

INTRODUCTION
The scientific character of Marx and Engels's materialist conception of history was based on their premise that a dialectical correspondence exists between the material processes of nature and the process of the historical development of human society. In other words, the epistemological foundation of historical materialism; that is, its claim to the scientific character of its concepts is based on the argument that both nature and history obey the same dialectical laws of motion and change, and that they can be apprehended by the human mind.
Engels's Dialectics of Nature in fact constitutes such an attempt to formulate the general epistemological foundation of historical materialism by demonstrating that the laws of dialectics are immanent in all objective reality, including natural, social, and cognitive processes.
The fact that our subjective thought and the objective world are subject to the same laws, and, hence, too, that in the final analysis they cannot contradict each other in their results, but must coincide, governs absolutely our whole theoretical thought. It is the unconscious and unconditional premise for theoretical thought.
In this manner, Marxist epistemology and the scientific status of the materialist conception of history presuppose the dialectical unity of all nature. The common structure of thought and nature guarantee the possibility of a science that leads to true knowledge of nature and history.
Before Marx and Engels history was seen by most people as a series of unconnected events or, to use a philosophical term “accidents”. There was no general explanation of this, history had no inner lawfulness. Once one accepts this point of view, the only motor force of historical events is the role of individuals “great men” (or women). In other words, we are left with an idealist and subjectivist view of the historical process.
This was the standpoint of the utopian socialists, who, despite their colossal insights and penetrating criticism of the existing social order, failed to understand the fundamental laws of historical development. For them, socialism was just a good idea, something that could therefore have been thought of a thousand years ago, so humankind would have been spared a lot of trouble!
It was Marx and Engels who for The first time explained that, all human development depends on the development of productive forces, and thus placed the study of history on a scientific basis. Because the first condition for science is that we are able to look beyond the particular and arrive at general laws. For instance, the early Christians could be regarded as communists (although their communism was of the utopian kind, based on consumption, not production). Their early experiments in communism led nowhere, and could lead nowhere, because the development of the productive forces at that time did not permit the development of real communism.
Human history is not an uninterrupted line towards progress. Alongside the line of ascent, there is a line of descent. There have been periods in history when, for different reasons, society has been thrown back, progress interrupted, and civilization and culture undermined. This was the case in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, in the period known at least in the English language as the Dark Ages. The Roman Empire’s reliance on slavery was replaced by a fairer society where workmanship and craft skills were encouraged and valued.
PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM
Early humans evolved some three million years ago out of a highly evolved species of ape. Slowly primitive humans moved away from the forests and into the plains; a transition which was accompanied by an improvement in the flexibility and dexterity of the hand.
As Engels explained, mastery over nature began with the development of the hand, with labor, and widened man’s horizon at every new advance. Men and women were social animals forced to band together and co-operate in order to survive. Unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, they developed the ability to generalize and think abstractly. Labor begins with the making of tools. With these tools, humans change their surrounding to meet their needs. “The animal merely uses its environment,” says Engels, “and brings about changes in it simply by his presence; Man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between Man and other animals, and once again it is labor that brings about this distinction.”
The economic forms were very simple. Humans roamed around in groups in search of food. This nomadic life was completely dominated with food gathering. Archaeologists call this period the Old Stone Age.
Then and for many thousands of years to come, private property did not exist. Everything that was made, collected, or produced was considered common property.
At a later stage, a new higher period emerged known as the new Stone Age. Instead of roaming for food, advances were made in cultivating crops and domesticating animals.
In this period, no private family existed. The children belonged to the entire tribe. In the stage of primitive communism (savagery and barbarism, each being a lower and higher stage respectively), no private property, classes, privileged elites, police or special coercive apparatus (the state) existed. The tribes themselves were divided into social units called clans or gentes. These, in fact, were very large family groups, which traced their descent from the female line alone. This is what is termed a matriarchal society. How else could it be when it was impossible to identify the real father of a child? It was forbidden for a man to cohabit with a woman from his own clan or gens, thus the tribes were made up from a coalition of clans. At certain times, a form of group marriage existed between the clans themselves.
This classless form of society was extremely democratic in its character. Everyone would participate in a general assembly to decide the important issues as they occurred, and their chiefs and officers would be elected for particular purposes.
Primitive communism however gave way to Feudalism, the rise of Absolute Monarchy, Capitalism and ultimately Imperialism which is regarded as the form of capitalism. In all this, contradictions in social, economic and political organization shaped historical development.
FOUNDATIONS FOR HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
In order to understand the critiques of historical materialism, an explanation of the building blocks, dialectics and materialism is required.
THE DIALECTICS
Knowledge of Hegel and his impact on Marx is necessary to understand almost all of Marx’s theories. Hegel’s contribution to philosophy was his dialectical method. This process of thinking is evident in Marx’s writing and is the foundation of Marxism. The underlying idea of the dialectical process is that mankind is separated or alienated from the Absolute, and the historical process is man’s gradual movement towards the Absolute, or in Hegel’s mind, God.
According to Hegel, the state of reality where man and the Absolute are reunited is the end of history.
The newer and truer forms of reality that leads man to the end of history are created through the interaction between the thesis and antithesis. These are stages that exist in contradiction to each other.
The thesis, antithesis, and synthesis are the actor of the dialectic. The thesis and antithesis compete with each other until a tipping-point is reached and the existing thesis is overthrown and replaced with the synthesis.
The synthesis created through this combination then becomes the new thesis. The newly formed thesis is on a higher level of development or understanding than the previous thesis. This new thesis is a truer form because the synthesis combines the good of both the thesis and antithesis, allowing the thesis to benefit from the contradiction. Contradiction is a necessary condition for advancement because you never know what enough is unless you know what is more than enough.
The newer thesis is another step towards the Absolute. The newly formed thesis, however, is not alone. Another antithesis exists. These two stages will again interact and the process will start all over again until another synthesis is formed. Even though a thesis closer to the Absolute is created following interactions of the thesis and antithesis, an antithesis will always be present until the Absolute is reached. Every replacement of the thesis with the synthesis is just a small step towards the Absolute. This process will continue until a thesis is formed where no antithesis exists. With no contradiction, the thesis will remain because it has connected man with the Absolute and eliminated alienation. Once this point is reached, the dialectical process is over. In summation, according to Hegel’s dialectic, man’s perception of reality is in a state of constant flux due to the unstable coexistence and successive resolution of the thesis and antithesis. With every successive resolution, a new state of reality is formed that is better than the previous state. Man is constantly on a path of improvement through the interaction of opposites, gradually moving closer and closer to the Absolute until no contradiction exists to force change in the present state. FEUERBACH’S MATERIALISM Marx’s materialism is based upon the work of a former student of Hegel, Ludwig Feierbach. Feuerbach’s thoughts are of an obviously materialistic nature since he didn’t admit the existence of anything that does not exist materially. Man was born on Earth, he will die on Earth, and no afterlife awaits him. Even though Marx believed strongly in the teaching of Hegel, he did not completely accept Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel was an idealist. To Hegel, the thesis and antithesis interact in the abstract and man’s movement towards the Absolute is not something that occurs in the material world. Marx thought the interaction happened in real life. The actions of people, not ideas, moved them closer to the Absolute. Marx believed that Hegel’s dialectic made sense, but that Hegel failed to develop the process in the correct realm, the realm of man. In rejecting idealism, Marx developed his view of the world based on materialism. Materialism is the opposite of idealism. According to materialists, matter is the only thing that can be proven to exist. Matter precedes everything and the material world comes Marx said, “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness”. (Marx and Engels 1983, 160) Religion to Marx is man’s attempt to ease the misery in life caused by alienation. To achieve peace of mind man creates a false god that he connects with. The god created is not the true absolute, but by uniting with a created Absolute, man achieves an illusory happiness. To achieve real happiness, man must discover the alienation causing the unhappiness and remove it through changing his circumstance in life.
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
In the hands of the nature and the reflection theory of knowledge resulted in a complete reversal of the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels and a complete return to the subjectivist dialectics of Hegel.
The historicists' identification of the problem of the relation between science and its object, on the one hand, and the relation between theory and practice, which is centered around the category of the "total subject," on the other, was possible only through a complete return to the Hegelian dialectics, because, for Hegel, reality was based only on an immediate identity (as opposed to a mediated unity) of subject and object. In other words, the question of the epistemological foundation of science could be reduced to the level of subjective practice only when the subject was taken in a Hegelian sense: as a subject that had the object as a part of its own being, as an absolute subject.
As a result of such Hegelian interpretations, the field of class struggle - that is, the level of social mediation - was expanded to include also the process of the historical mediation between humans and nature. In other words, the whole process of the historical development of productive forces was collapsed into the field of class antagonisms. The proletariat, as an agent of class struggle in capitalist society, was transformed into the grand "subject" of all history.
In the same way, science, which Marx considered to be a product of the mutual interaction between human beings and nature through productive labor, was transformed into the ideology of various classes in struggle. Such a move, of course, was not simply a rejection of Engels's and Lenin's interpretations of Marx, but of Marx's own dialectical concepts as well; a rejection that is not without its own contradictions.
First, it is a well-established fact that for Marx the proletariat is not a creator of capitalism, but rather a creation, a result, of the historical mediation process that had culminated in the capitalist relations of production. For him, capitalist production relations, as a whole, are beyond the proletariat's immediate existence and are therefore external to it. Historical materialism therefore asserts that economic forces are the primary forces that propel man through history as social classes interact. Economic interactions are how man relates to the material world. Man change the material world, not with thought and conceptualization, but with picks, shovels, ploughs, diggers, looms and lathes. For instance, farmers at one point used animal driven plows to plant crops in order to make a living. Eventually, tractors that performed the same task as animals, but much more efficiently, were developed and gave farmers greater control of their environment. The tractor was simply a development in the economic forces. As economic forces develop, class struggle become more intense. Class struggles provide the contradiction that causes the dialectical process to work in Marx concept of historical materialism. Marx and Engels clearly declare the importance of classes in history with the first sentence of the Communist Manifesto, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. (2005, 7).
Socialism
From the foregoing, it is evident that Marx deduces the inevitability of the transformation of capitalist society into socialist society and wholly and exclusively from the economic law of the development of contemporary society. The socialization of labor, which is advancing ever more rapidly in thousands of forms and has manifested itself very strikingly, during the half-century since the death of Marx, in the growth of large-scale production, capitalist cartels, syndicates and trusts, as well as in the gigantic increase in the dimensions and power of finance capital, provides the principal material foundation for the inevitable advent of socialism. The intellectual and moral motive force and the physical executor of this transformation is the proletariat, which has been trained by capitalism itself. The proletariat’s struggle against the bourgeoisie, which finds expression in a variety of forms ever richer in content, inevitably becomes a political struggle directed towards the conquest of political power by the proletariat ("the dictatorship of the proletariat"). The socialization of production cannot but lead to the means of production becoming the property of society, to the "expropriation of the expropriators." A tremendous rise in labor productivity, a shorter working day, and the replacement of the remnants, the ruins, of small-scale, primitive and disunited production by collective and improved labor; such are the direct consequences of this transformation.

RELEVANCE OF THE CONCEPT OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM TO THE CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.
No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production, antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals ‘social conditions of existence, but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The pre-history of society as earlier stated accordingly closes with this social formation.

CONCLUSION
The general conclusion therefore brings to light that in the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.
The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.
The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense super-structure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

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