The historical materialism is a political, sociological and economic theory developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the nineteenth century. The thinkers had understood that the nineteenth century, living from the high social change brought about by the Industrial Revolution , had a new configuration, based on the production force of the bourgeoisie and the exploitation of the working class labor by the bourgeois class (owners of the factories ).
Sociologists also understood that there has always been a historical movement of class struggle in society and that this movement was the essence of humanity. Marx and Engels’ theory diverged from German idealism, mainly from Hegel, who believed that there was an intellectual movement from each era that influences people. For Marx and Engels, it was the people who made their time.
See also: Social inequality – an evil combated by Karl Marx
Historical and dialectical materialism
Historical and dialectical materialism is the name of the theory developed by Marx and Engels. Marx carried out economic studies published in the book series O capital , in partnership with Friedrich Engels, as well as wrote and had the posthumous publication of his political economic manuscripts , in which he studied the political organization of Europe after the Industrial Revolution.
Karl Marx was the main theorist of historical materialism.
Marx was deeply influenced by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , who had formulated a dialectical theory based on the idea of the formation of a period spirit, which, according to its author, was a kind of metaphysical and collective idea that made people live a certain way.
At first, Marx was a supporter of this theory, however, over time, he noticed internal contradictions in it . One of them was the idea of immobility of social classes . While Hegelian theory admits a metaphysical immobility of classes, Marx admitted that the opposite is possible: the subversion of classes. Such a subversion would only be possible through a revolution.
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For Marx and Engels, there is an internal contradiction in the capitalist system that makes workers (proletariat) see themselves as producers of everything through their workforce, but excluded from the education, health and security system. Workers produce, but cannot access what is rightfully theirs.
The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, does not work (in the Marxist view, the bourgeois only manage what the proletariat produces), but enjoys what it yields from proletarian work and still has access to health, education and security services. This contradiction made Marx and Engels think of a practical application of the ideas resulting from dialectical historical materialism.
For German theorists, workers should become class conscious and realize that they are being cheated in this system. From then on, they should unite and take the power of factories from the hands of the bourgeoisie and the power of the state, which, according to Marx and Engels, serves the bourgeoisie.
Engels was Marx’s intellectual partner.
The proletarian revolution, as Marx called it, would be the first phase of a government that would tend to reach its perfect state: communism , a utopia in which there would be no social classes (such as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat). However, for this, a dictatorial government based on proletarian force, the dictatorship of the proletariat , would be necessary . During that time, social classes would be suppressed by the total nationalization of private property.
Also read: The material conditions of existence in the Marxist dialectic
Characteristics of historical materialism
Historical materialism intends, initially, to break with any idealistic tradition . For Marx, idealism is only at the ideal level and fails to achieve anything that actually changes society. This author’s intention was to promote a social revolution that would subvert the prevailing order of power of the dominant class over the dominated class. In this sense, the fundamental characteristic of understanding historical materialism is social change, so that the proletariat can access power and establish a government of social uniformity.
Marxist theory understands that humanity is defined by its material production , hence the word “materialism” in its name. The Marxism also believes that the history of mankind is the history of class struggle , placing thus the social classes as opposites . In this sense, there is a dialectical relationship between classes, which gives the term “dialectic” to the name of Marxist theory, moving away from any sense of it previously proposed by Hegel or Plato .
Dialectical materialism is, then, the understanding that there has been a dispute of historical social classes since the dawn of humanity and that it is conditioned to the material production (work and result of work) of society. The problem is that, in the Marxist perspective, the proletariat works and the bourgeoisie enjoys the profit provided by the working class through the appropriation of work and what Marx called surplus value.
The added value is, for the author, the price difference between a final product and its raw material. This difference is added by the printed work on the product, and, according to Marx, all the work is done by the workers, while the bourgeoisie only enjoys the profit. The profit received by the bourgeoisie is a kind of appropriation of the work of the worker , who has his labor force usurped and falsely rewarded by a salary.
Also read: Neoliberalism – conservative economic vision that preaches the minimum state
Criticisms of historical materialism and historical materialism after the 20th century
The context in which Marx and Engels formulated dialectical historical materialism was quite specific: industrial England in the 19th century . There was, in that space and time, a detailed relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, with their differences in social class.
In fact, the adoption of the method proposed by historical dialectical materialism for an analysis and production of philosophical, historical and sociological knowledge remains current. However, social analyzes underwent severe changes in the 20th century and continue to change in the 21st century due to the changes brought about by the conquest of rights, urbanization , technology and, mainly, globalization and the expansion of capitalism.
There is still a clash of social classes , but it is not directly expressed by the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat anymore, since other categories and a new configuration of capitalism have entered the scene: financial capitalism . What remains today is the exploitation of the poorest strata by the wealthiest strata of society.
In the context of change, theorists emerged who gave a new interpretation to socialist thought and historical materialism or even criticized the Marxist form of interpretation and social analysis. What is most interesting is that the criticisms and attempts to overcome the Marxist method, deeply widespread among left-wing intellectuals, arose doubly between left and right theorists. We will deal with some of these authors below:
- Antonio Gramsci
We can mention the Italian philosopher and linguist Antonio Gramsci as one of the first Marxists to postulate Marxist ideas that surpassed Marx . Gramsci was openly communist, he was even one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party. One of his main pillars of political formation was the intellectual, imprisoned for opposition to the extreme right regime imposed by totalitarian dictator Benito Mussolini , fascism, the writings of Karl Marx.
Highly influenced by Marx, the Italian philosopher was concerned with proposing socialist theories, going so far as to go beyond the analyzes of the influencer himself. Gramsci’s understanding of the state, for example, goes far beyond the understanding of a simple mechanism for the perpetuation of power (the bourgeois state and the post-revolution socialist state).
Despite Gramsci’s apparent intention to found a Soviet-type state in Italy in opposition to the fascist state, the philosopher was also not in full agreement with Lenin’s government proposal , much less understood the state as mere full application of strength over individuals, as was the totalitarian state imposed by Josef Stalin . Gramsci seemed to find himself in the middle ground, in a search for a balance between strength and administrative control, when thinking about his conception of the State.
Marx’s criticism and attempt to overcome it was perpetuated in the field of philosophy with the political philosophers of the 20th century, including the post-structuralists. However, it is worth noting that, in almost all cases presented here, theorists started from Marxist conceptions and adopted political positions aligned with the thinking of the left. What they sought to overcome was the dichotomy proposed by historical materialism.
- Hannah Arendt
Philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt made harsh criticisms of Marx’s political and philosophical thinking. First, we can highlight a strong intellectual presence of his doctoral advisor in his work, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Second, Arendt’s political views were based on a dialectical notion much more in line with Hegel’s idealist dialectic, a tradition opposed to dialectical historical materialism.
Because she suffered from Nazi persecution during Hitler’s government to the point of being arrested and having to flee to the United States, Arendt turned his studies towards the phenomenon of totalitarianism . Having understood totalitarian power through the studies of the governments of Hitler , Mussolini and Stalin, Arendt listed parts of the revolutionary lectures pointed out by Marx and the indication of the need, in the first moment after the revolution, for a strong and dictatorial state (the dictatorship of proletariat), the totalitarian phenomenon in the Soviet Union. In part, totalitarianism arises from the power project centered on a strong and undemocratic state idea.
The post-structuralist philosophers (theorists who appeared in the second half of the twentieth century with the intention of elevating the structuralists’ philosophical, sociological, linguistic and anthropological analysis proposal to the maximum) also had intellectual alignment with the left ideals, but they criticized what we can call an orthodox Marxism . For these intellectuals, we will mention here the French philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, it will be thought that the 20th century faced other demands and other paradigms than those found by Marx in the 19th century.
- Michael Foucault
For Foucault, the center of capitalist power is given by the bourgeois state, since the Industrial Revolution , not by mere centered force and by a simple state apparatus, but by the surveillance and disciplining of people’s bodies, creating what the thinker called docile bodies. Foucault understood that a surveillance mechanism was created that, instead of concentrating power on a single axis (as it was with the Old Regime, in which the monarch made all decisions and held power), spreads the power in several institutions that exercise the function of watching people and disciplining their bodies .
These institutions are those of confinement (which confine the individual in a certain space to make his body a product of the discipline): school, barracks, factory, prison, hospital and hospice. Their intention is to keep capitalism in full working order with high production . For this reason, it is not a question of class struggle and the overthrow of capitalism, but of revising this way of producing power.
In this understanding, we see Marx as a kind of important theorist, but that has not been explained in a satisfactory way. We find in Foucault a much stronger presence of the thoughts of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche with regard to the forms of perception of power. As Foucault himself said, he had a kind of intellectual “toolbox” in which he kept Nietzsche’s ideas (and, in a way, also Marx’s historical materialism) and used them as devices for the construction of his own theory.
- Gilles Deleuze
Deleuze pointed out even more problems, as his vision went beyond confinement: for the philosopher, the end of the 20th century was beginning to live an era of control . Control is an evolution of Foucault’s discipline that no longer needs confinement, but is exercised in a dispersed way by virtual mechanisms and flexible work. People are controlled all the time, because the control mechanisms (media and, later, internet, social networks, etc.) express a form of domination of the individual full time.
Work goes beyond the workspace. The individual works without ceasing, he receives and answers e-mails from the service in his “free” time, he is charged to be an entrepreneur of himself all the time. This new configuration removes the notion of the proletariat from the industrial space and shows that, in the 20th century, the proletariat is much more exploited , because, in addition to exploitation in the workplace, there is what happens outside it, reinforcing the gears of capitalism.
Dialectical historical materialism does not allow these perceptions of new mechanisms, as it is based on a simplistic material dialectic that sees only the clash of forces between the bourgeois and the proletariat and does not perceive the mechanisms of capital that exist beyond that. Therefore, we can affirm that in Gilles Deleuze’s post-structuralist political philosophy we find a synthesis of some of Marx’s ideas combined with a strong presence of Nietzsche’s thoughts.
