Teach Yourself Marxism

What did Marx mean by historical materialism?

What forces underpin the development of human society?

Egyptian workers built the gates of Thebes


Thursday 02 January 2025  

SOCIALIST WORKER Issue

Some of the most popular approaches to understanding history are the least convincing. Most people still learn that history is about the wars, laws and loves of powerful kings, a few queens, religious leaders and politicians.

We are taught that history is a journey from an oppressive past to a “glorious present” and the triumph of liberal democracy. Slavery, colonialism and tyranny were just creases ironed out by enlightened leaders.

But fantasies of endless progress have always been rudely interrupted by war, economic crisis, climate disaster and political upheavals.

Marxists have a distinct understanding of historical change—one that puts human activity, and specifically workers’ activity, at the heart of events.

Karl Marx’s great insight was that human beings “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”.

It is working people who have a key role in initiating change. The communist poet Bertolt Brecht shone a light on the hidden role of enslaved people and labourers in history when he asked:

“Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
“The books are filled with names of kings.
“Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
“And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
“Who built the city up each time?”

As Marx wrote, “History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth,’ it ‘wages no battles’.” It is humans who do those things.

The Marxist approach to history focuses on the hidden forces that underpin the development of human society.

All human development depends on the development of productive forces—the technology, machinery and labour power used in production.

In the past, those productive forces developed enough to create a surplus in addition to what people needed to survive. Society divided into classes, with a minority controlling the surplus and a majority excluded from enjoying a share. Classes had different interests and fought for access to that surplus.

Today, societies produce more than enough food to feed everyone. But the imperative for the ruling class to create profit means some go hungry.

History is shaped by the struggles of successive social classes to mould society in their own interests.

Marx’s view of history, known as historical materialism, helps us to understand that there is nothing inevitable about progress.

Marx did discuss how technology influenced society. New technology opens up new possibilities for changes in society. The invention of the steam engine allowed for industrial capitalists to dominate.

But technology does not do this alone, and it is not automatic that society will progress forwards. It is all too easy to imagine capitalism collapsing into climate catastrophe rather than giving way to socialist freedom.

Marx and Engels are often accused of reducing everything to economics. But as Frederick Engels wrote in 1890, “According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted.”

Visions of fully automated, luxury communism may sound fantastic, but realising the potential of new technology requires a struggle.

Technology can always be appropriated by those who are hostile to progress. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels argued that class struggle is key to understanding history.

In that struggle, the organisation, confidence and understanding of the working class will be crucial in whether society moves forward or collapses backwards into barbarism.