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[ Introduction to Marxism ] Introduction to Marxist theory on history Historical Materialism: the marxist view of history The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to each other, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the mutual ruin of the contending classes. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: The Communist Manifesto Section A: How society work Making sense of history: looking behind the story The ruling class portrays history as the doings of great men, the role of governors and explorers, lists of wars and invasions and other important events. History in school books is like a story a succession of events without any general pattern. Marxists say that in order to make sense of the story of history what people, famous or not, actually did we have to understand the overall economic and social context to show why they acted in the way they did. Take for example the American Civil War of 1861 - 65.
What do most people know about this war? Northern Americans, the Union, fought against the Southern Confederates; Bluecoats fought Grey coats. Why? Most people would say, well, it was about slavery. The Union president, Abraham Lincoln, was against slavery, while the southerners were in favour of it. Thats the myth; the northerners fighting slavery out of the goodness of their hearts.
But Marxists would say there was a lot more to it than that. In fact the northern industrialists behind the Union were in bitter conflict with the big southern farmers who owned the slaves; most of these industrialists were racists and not very sympathetic to black slaves. The basic causes of the war were in this economic conflict between the to different sections of the US ruling class. Lets take the example of the English civil war of 1641 - 49. Most people know it was cavaliers against roundheads, parliament versus the crown, Oliver Cromwell versus Charles 1. But why?
Who did parliament represent whose interests? And who backed the king, and why? When we investigate this, we find that different class forces were involved. So, a Marxist analysis of the English civil war would try to explain the story of the war in terms of the class interests involved.
This method of looking at things to discover the real class and social interests involved in events, of course is relevant to more contemporary events. Why did the US president George Bush start the Gulf war? To defend plucky little Kuwait against the monster Saddam? Marxists say no, this was just the propaganda; Bush started the war to defend the economic and political interests of the US, including the oil supplies from the area. Another example of how we try to look behind the surface events at the real story.
So this is the first idea: Historical materialism is about discovering the class interests which determine how people act in history. Now read the following quote about the English civil war from someone who fought in it, and think how it relates to what we have discussed so far: A very great part of the knights and gentlemen of England adhered to the King. And most of the tenants of these gentlemen, and also most of the poorest of the people, whom the others call the rabble, did follow the gentry and ere for the king. On the Parliaments side were (besides themselves) the smaller part of the gentry in most of the counties, and the greatest part of the tradesmen and freeholders and the middle sort of men, especially in those corporations and counties which depend on such manufactures. (Colonel Baxter: Autobiography) What Baxter is saying here is that the conflict was between the king and the aristocracy (supported by those most dependent on them) on the one hand: and the rising middle classes on the other.
This of course is exactly the Marxist explanation of the Civil War. (See Christopher Hill: The English Revolution 1640) Different types of society The type of society we have now capitalism only started to come into existence about 350 years ago, first in Holland and England. But human society existed for hundreds of thousands of years before that. In societies before capitalism, the way people lived was different to what we know now. Before capitalism, in Western Europe and in China and Japan before the arrival of the Europeans, the system which existed was feudalism.
Instead of todays capitalists who own firms and employ workers for a wage, under feudalism the ruling class was the aristocratic nobility the lords based on large estates in the countryside. The oppressed class, instead of workers earning a wage, were the peasants (serfs) doing agricultural work on the lords estate. They had their own plots of land, but they had to work for the lord for part of the week or give part of their own produce to the lord. In Europe, before feudalism the predominant form of society was slavery the type of society of classical Rome and Greece. The majority of people were literally owned by the ruling nobles, doing manual labour on the land (although some slaves worked in the towns), having no rights of their own. From these few examples we can see that as society evolves, as it gets richer, the way it is organised changes.
The examples we gave here are all examples of class society, where there were rulers and ruled. However, before slavery there were other forms of society where there was no ruling class something which the capitalists today dont like to think about. Marxism tries to analyse each society in terms of how it began, how it worked and how it was replaced by another type of society. The basic form of organising any society, the way its economy works, Marxists call the mode of production. Below we will try to explain this a bit more.
Marx tried to explain these two things (class interests and mode of production) in the following passage one of the most famous in all his writings. Read it a couple of times and try to get the gist (NB. Marx and Engels, in common with their contemporaries, always talk about men rather than people we should make the translation). In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations which are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations constitute the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which corresponds definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social and intellectual life process in general.
It is not the consciousness of men which determines their being but on the contrary, their social being which determines their consciousness. (From the Preface to A Critique of Political Economy of 185 The mode of production of hunter-gatherer society So far we have seen that Marxists say the following things History has to be analysed according to the different social and class interests at work, 2. There are different types of society, and that society changes over time, 3. The basic way that society is organised is called the mode of production. Lets think about point 3) in a bit more detail and try to relate it to the quote from Marx. If you understand this bit, youll have Marx's key to understanding human history in your hands.
Marx says that in order to produce their livelihood, people enter into definite relations and these are indispensable and independent of their will. All peoples through history have lived in societies and co-operated with one another to produce the food, clothes and shelter they need to survive. As far as the politicians and social engineers of today are concerned, society is just made up of individuals and their families. The A. L. P.
dont believe in the existence of the working class only this or that kind of voter; the sociologists divide people into income brackets, but have no idea about social organisation. But, even when the first humans were tribes roaming the African plains in search of food, they had a definite form of social organisation and collaborated with one another to gather and hunt. But the fact remains that hunting and gathering is a hard way to earn a living the whole tribe had to work every day to eke out a living. There was no room for slackers. The only division of labour was based on gender and age, and indeed, the early tribes were extended families. If Kerry Packer dropped out of the sky and landed in a hunter-gatherer society, hed have to go out and hunt with the rest of the tribe or hed go hungry; and if he tried to set up a firm and make a profit from other peoples hunting hed be sorely disappointed, because after the hunters and their families had been fed, there be nothing left over by way of profit and hed still go hungry.
Lets suppose that the land in a particular country is particularly bountiful or the hunters particularly skillful and the hunters and gathers produce enough to keep themselves and their children and old folk and have a little over to spare. We know that under these conditions special roles developed in tribal society there were priests and chiefs that had the time to study the stars and the seasons, have fine clothes made for them, carry out social and cultural affairs etc. , and these people all enjoyed a privileged position by being free from labour and became mini-rulers of one kind or another. If a sociologist from a university were to come across such a society, they might write learned papers about the customs and religion etc. , or any number of things, but the key to understanding what is going on in such a society is not these kind of things, but the way they organised themselves to produce their livelihood and that little bit extra. Imagine if a group of Militant members were to find themselves living in such a society; no doubt they would share everything equally, work cooperatively, making all decisions with discussion and voting, etc. , and form what we could call a primitive communist society.
But their choice would be very limited. One thing they couldnt do, even if they wanted to, is set up a capitalist society. The fundamental wealth of society, the productive technique and division of labour are not sufficiently developed. With a small number of people simply hunting and gathering, you cant have firms, banks, shareholders, capital or capitalism. The productive forces are just not sufficiently developed.
This hints at another important point we shall come back to: the social relations, the type of society, has to fit the level of development of the productive resources Classes and exploitation: the Neolithic Revolution In Section 1 we talked about three different types of society which have existed in western Europe during the past 5000 years: slave society, feudalism and capitalism. In other words, very different types of class societies have existed during this period. Slavery, feudalism and capitalism are all characterised by having a ruling class which owns or controls the land, materials, equipment etc. used for production, what Marxists calls the means the means of production. Through their ownership or control of the means of production, the ruling class is able to exploit the labour of the oppressed class, whether these are slaves, serfs or proletarians under capitalism. But before slave society, for hundreds of thousands of years, people had organised themselves into clans and tribes which had no ruling class exploiting the others.
Of course, many of these clans and tribes had chiefs and elders with authority: but they were not an economically privileged social layer, not a class. Stable social classes, which involves exploiters and exploited, are a product of the great change which took place in human society about 6, 000 years ago. This was the most fundamental change in human history, called the Neolithic Revolution. What happened? To cut a long story short, in the area which is now Iraq (Mesopotamia), people developed a settled form of agriculture. Instead of roaming around killing animals and picking berries, they learned how to domesticate animals and grow crops.
They became farmers. Of course, at first this was a hard struggle. But over time, they learned that this was much more economically productive. Instead of always having to struggle just to produce what they needed to live on, they began to produce a surplus. They started to live in settlements, which gradually became bigger, leading to the first cities. The surplus they produced was not of course big enough for everyone to double or treble the amount they consumed.
Gradually, a layer of priests emerged who began to take the leading role in organising the new settlements and taking control of and using the new economic surplus. The priests were the core of the first ruling class, organising society so they could snaffle the economic surplus that had been produced. Another thing we should note about the Neolithic revolution: as society gets richer, as the first towns and cities are built, then production gets more complicated. As farming gets more efficient, less people have to do farming.
Others are freed up to become artisans, producing goods like pottery and jewellery, in the towns. In other words, different types of jobs appear, things get more specialised: Marx said that the social division of labour got more complex. Now another quote: its from Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, a brilliant man who wrote Class Struggles in the Ancient Greek World: Class (essentially a relationship) is the collective social expression of the fact of exploitation, the way in which exploitation is embodied in the social structure.
By exploitation, I mean the appropriation of part of the product of the labour of others. A class is a group of persons in the community identified by their position in the whole system of social production, defined above all according to their relationship (primarily in terms of their degree of ownership or control) to the conditions of production (that is to say to the means of production) and to other social classes. The individuals constituting a given class may or may not be partly or wholly conscious of their own identity and common interests as a class, and they may or may not feel antagonism to members of other social classes. What Ste Croix is getting at is that you cant separate classes from exploitation: if you have an upper and a lower class, one is exploited by the other.
And that takes place through the control or ownership of the means of production Summary to Section A: the rulers and the ruled At this point, you should look back at the quote from Marx. He is saying that the basis of every society is how people organise to produce their livelihood, and in every society this is done in a definite and specific way, giving rise to certain relations of production. In class societies, these relationships are about control and ownership of the productive process, about exploitation. Exploitation in turn is about controlling the product of the labour of others, to appropriate the economic surplus created.
Here is another quote in which Marx says the same thing in a slightly different way: The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the producers determines the relationship between the rulers and the ruled... It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers a relationship naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of sovereignty and dependence, in short the corresponding specific form of the state. Note that in the first quote above, Matx says the economic basis of society is the sum total of the social relations of products, and that this determines the legal and political superstructure and the social and intellectual life of society in general. This is among the most controversial propositions of historical materialism, which is the topic of section B. Section B: Base and superstructurHow the different bits of society fit together Marxists are generally accused of stressing too much the role of economic factors. In order the probe this point it is worth considering some concrete examples.
A goof place to start is the present legal system in Australia. If you sign a mortgage agreement and dont keep up the payments, either your house will be taken back by the bank or you will be taken to court (or both). If you are taken to court, the judge will find against you and your would be on the street. But why? Why doesnt the judge say you have the right to keep your house and not pay for it? The answer of course is that the whole of Australian law is founded on protecting private property, and that corresponds with the basic type of society we have capitalism.
If we had a legal system based on hostility to private property, then the whole thing would begin to break down. Nobody would be able to enforce a contract or collect any debts. Shoplifting would be legalized, Banks and companies would collapse. A moments thought shows this is obvious: the legal system has to fit the property system, the existing class system. Capitalist law is designed to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. This is recognised in the common sense saying that theres one law for the rich, another for the poor: of course there is, thats what its there for!
Now, lets think about the political system. Look at any major capitalist country the US, France or Germany. All the government parties in these countries are pro-capitalist parties. The newspaper and TV channels are all owned by big business and churn out capitalist ideas.
An idea that doesnt make a profit for somebody, doesnt get a look-in. The whole political culture, with the exception of socialist parties trying to fight the system, is pro-capitalist: the political system fits together with the economic system. This is what Marx means by the political and legal superstructure which rises on the economic base. The legal and political system of course are very direct products of the economic system, in which its easy to trace the interests of the ruling class. We can go back and look at the legal system under feudalism and the prevailing form of politics, and see how it defended the landed aristocracy and the king. But there are many more complicated things in society in which the domination of the ruling class is more complicated.
Marx said: The ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class. Is this true and what ideas? Lets start with Australia in 1996. Open up a copy of any major newspaper. They have lots of debates among themselves, but you will not find a single daily paper in favour of maintaining workers Awards, let alone the abolition of capitalism! Ruling class ideas are propagated by ruling class control of the means of mass communication.
But direct propaganda is not the sole way that ruling class ideas are purveyed, even in the newspapers. Ruling class ideas what we call ideology is spontaneously reproduced in every section of society, including the working class. Often it goes in the form of what is known as common sense. Think of a few common sense ideas lets list a few: Men are stronger than women You should get a fair days pay for a fair days work Inequality between people is only human nature There always be rich and poor Trade unions are bad for the economy Gay sex is unnatural These ideas fit together with the common assumptions of capitalist law and politics: they are part of the ideology which has grown up around capitalist society.
Of course, under capitalism these kind of ideas are fought against by socialists and sometimes by other radical groups like the Greens. Over time, the ruling class ideas change to meet changing circumstances, and also because of struggle against them. For example, 100 years ago the following statements would have been widely accepted in Australia: Its only natural that white people should rule the world Britons are superior to other races Black people are inferior Men are superior to women both physically and intellectually Now these are not commonly accepted, although there are many people who do believe in them but you will rarely find these ideas publicly advocated in newspapers and by leading politicians. Why? First, of course because there has been a struggle against these ideas.
But, vitally, material conditions have changed. The British Empire has gone. Britain no longer rules 30 % of the world. The ruling class has had to come to terms with being a third rate power: ideas about the white mans role and Britains superiority have changed with the changing conditions. Women have entered the workforce on a massive scale: ideas about the complete inferiority of women no longer fit the changing circumstances although of course womens oppression and sexism still exist.
In all the ideas we have discussed here, we can see a direct link between the social relations of production (capitalist), the ruling class (the capitalist class or bourgeoisie), the legal and political superstructure (pro-capitalist), and the ruling ideas, ideology (pro-capitalist, anti-working class, racist and sexist). They all fit together. Once they no longer fit together in a more or less harmonious way, society begins to go into crisis. There is another aspect of ruling class ideology which we should take into account. There are of course disagreements among the capitalist class itself although not on fundamentals.
There are different interest groups among the capitalists: for example those based on finance and banking do not always have the same interests as those based no manufacturing industry. Beyond the different interests, there are different assessments of how best to advance the needs of the capitalist system, how many concessions to make to the working class and so on. These sorts of differences are reflected in different ideological trends in capitalist thinking liberalism and conservatism for example and in immediate practical political differences. Sometimes these differences can become very sharp, without ever going beyond the bounds of capitalist ideology. Of course, there are many ideas and fields of intellectual activity in society which are not so easy to analyse.
For example, what about cinema, music, painting, TV dramas, pop music, the arts in general? Do they all have pro-capitalist ideology embedded in them? This is a complicated question and very controversial among Marxists. The answer is yes and no it depends. Lets take an easy example James Bond movies. These are permeated with pro-capitalist ideology which is absolutely transparent.
On the other hand, it would be difficult to argue that the American school of painters called the Abstract Impressionists, or a particular piece of jazz music is a piece of bourgeois ideology. Nonetheless, it is possible to explain how these forms of artistic expression grew up at this particular point in time, and what developments in society gave rise to them. For example, the youth culture of the 1960 s grew up on the basis of a generation of young people who had a lot of money to spend flower power wouldnt have got very far in the 1930 s! Marx's ideas about how the law, politics and ideas in general fit together with the economic basis of society are not just applicable to capitalism. For example, Marxists have analysed the role of the Catholic Church under feudalism as a key factor in the ideological cement of feudal society, justifying the rule of the landed nobility and the role of the crown, None of this should lead us to conclude that it is possible to predict exactly every aspect of law, politics and art just on the basis of knowing that a society is feudal or capitalist: it can only tell us the general parameters. For example, the French legal system is very different from the British.
In France you are (more or less) guilty until proven innocent. In Britain you are (in theory) innocent until proven guilty. In order to explain this difference, we have to study the history of these legal systems in detail. The fact that Britain and France are both capitalist wont help us much in explaining these differences: but one thing is noticeable.
Both British and French system are owned on defence of private property. They both fit the basic relations of production The state One thing we have left out so far, in discussing the evolution of class society and the legal-political superstructure, is of course the state the entire bureaucratic apparatus which guards the domination of the ruling class. The role of the state is explained in a separate paper in this pack. For the moment it is enough to note the following propositions of Marxist theory The state is an apparatus to defend the continued rule of the ruling class. 2. The state is ultimately a body of armed people in other words, the core of the state when it comes to the crunch are the police and the armed forces. 3. The state did not exist before class society, but only came into existence with the division of society into classes.
Section C: The ruling class and revolutio The ruling class and revolution How does one type of society get transformed into a completely new type How is it that feudalism came to an end and was replaced by capitalism why arent we still living under feudalism? Marx approaches the problem this way in the next passage from one of his writings quoted above (the 1859 Preface to the Critique of Political Economy): At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms with the property relations From the forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. What does this mean? Here we have to remind ourselves of the way that society fits together. A certain level of production technique gives rise to definite social relations of production.
Lets think about this point. Remember the hunter-gatherer society we talked about above. We noted that there were different ways the people there could organise themselves on the basis of thier production, which consists of hunting, fishing, picking fruit and a few handicrafts (the exact details dont matter for our purposes). However, we also said that capitalism couldnt exist there, because to get capitalism you need a money economy, capital, industry, banks, a developed division of labour, etc. This is impossible in our very under-developed desert island (so long as it remains isolated from the rest of the world). The level of productive technique, or to put it another way, the level of development of the productive forces, sets definite limits to the type of society you can have.
In a book he wrote in 1845, The Holy Family, Marx presented this in a very sharp manner when he said: The hand mill (for grinding flour Ed. ) gives you the feudal lord; the steam mill gives you the industrial capitalist. There is a large element of truth in this, but painted so boldly it is an overstatement. The development of the productive forces places definite limits on the type of social relations you cna have, but does not absolutely determine them in detail. We know that the level of productive technique associated with feudalism many based on the agriculture of rural peasants in other parts of the world gave rise to a different type of society based not on the rule of lords based in the countryside as in Britain, France and Germany, but to the rule of a centralised state bureaucracy under a king (or in the Ottoman Empire in Turkey and North Africa, a Sultan).
But overall, the level of productive technique and the type off social relations have to fit together more or less harmoniously, and this in turn has to fit together with the legal, political and ideological superstructure. But what happens if the fit begins to break down? In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the growth of the productivity of agriculture created the basis for sections of the peasants to move off the land into the towns. The growth of trade and commerce began to create merchants in the towns with huge amounts of money capital to invest: the conquest or pillage of colonial lands like South America concentrated new ealth, including huge amounts of precious metal like gold and silver, which could be used as coins. The scene was set for the development of a manufacturing, capitalist class the bourgeoisie developing within feudalism.
As production developed, the development of the productive forces came into conflict with the existing relations of production those of the domination of the feudal lords, the landed aristocracy. As Marx notes: A period of revolution then ensued. This period of revolution was of course the period of the bourgeois, capitalist, revolutions against feudalism most notably the French Revolution of 1789, the English Revolution of 1641 9, which destroyed the monarchy and brought Oliver Cromwell to power, the unification of Italy (the Risorgiamento) led by Garibaldi in the 1840 s. The United States has had TWO bourgeois revolutions first George Washingtons revolt against the British Crown, leading to the Declaration of Independence in 1778, and second, the Civil War of 1861 5, in which the northern industrial capitalists united the country, by destroying the slave mode of production in the south, and creating a unified country based on capitalist production relations. By clearing away feudal and pre-capitalist social relations and state structures, the bourgeois revolution creates the basis for extending and ensuring the domination of capitalism. The feudal aristocracy was either destroyed, or integrated into a reconstituted capitalist class (as happened in Britain).
Huge sections of the serfs, the rural peasantry, are driven off the land and forced into the towns to become wage labourers, proletarians, the core of the new working class. The transformation from feudalism to capitalism takes place via revolution. As Marx says: the bourgeois emerges on to the historical stage as a most revolutionary class. Section D: Freedom and determinisFreedom and determination According to Marx: Men make their own history, but not in conditions of their own making. This has to be put together with two other statements by Marx: that production relations are indispensable and independent of their (human beings) will, and the notion that what distinguishes human beings from animals is consciousness.
Imagine a peasant serf in feudal England who believes in the socialist Commonwealth and hates the system a very advanced and far-seeing serf! That doesnt stop the serf being trapped in a set of feudal social relations, dominated by his feudal lord. However, being a conscious being, het serf could have taken conscious action: for example, by organising a peasant uprising. But not in conditions of his own choosing an individual peasant could not wish away feudalism by an act of will. Human beings have choices, they have free will: but their field of action is strictly limited by the economic, social and political circumstances in which they find themselves. However, despite the limitations of circumstances, history works through active human agencies who have free will.
People have choices. The idea of a socialist serf however is highly improbable, because the ideology of socialism hadnt been thought of. We are all products of the time in which we live. Today, we cant think in terms of a new ideology or theory which wont be developed until a thousand years from now. So we have free will, but only within definite limits. The problem from the point of view of Marxist theory is that, as Marx and Engels put it, the political-ideological superstructure reacts upon the economic base of society.
People can try to change the existing social relations and sometimes succeed. For example, the British deliberately kept the price of land high in Australia to promote the development of capitalist agriculture: extreme facility of acquiring land, by which every man has been encouraged to become a Proprietor, producing what he can by his own unassisted efforts... [but] what is now required is to check this extreme facility and to encourage the formation of a class of labourers for hir (Colonial Secretary Lord Goderick, quoted in No Paradise for Workers by Ken Buckley and Ted Wheelwright). This is just one example of how the development of ideas reacts with the economic base of society. Ideas, inventions, are crucial to the development of new productive techniques, which in turn help to transform production relations. New ideas about equality and social justice create movements which fight against the prevailing system.
As Marx put it, ideas, when mobilising millions, themselves become a material force. This is especially true of the struggle for socialism. The capitalist revolution was fought out with the feudal lords on the basis of a religious ideology. Socialist revolution is the first revolution in human history based on a totally conscious attempt to transform the social relations of production and bring them under the control of the producers themselves. The way in which production relations, the state, politics and ideology fit together will be completely transformed.
The literature on this topic is vast, so the choice of further reading is arbitrary. To early get into the topic it is worth reading What Happened in History? And at least the first 50 pages of The German Ideology. In addition to the works listed below, The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, also now available as a Penguin Classic, is important to read. Recommended reading Basic What happened in History?
C. Gordon Childe, Penguin Books 2. The German Ideology, Marx and Engels, Lawrence and Wishart 3. Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels, Penguin 4. Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859 Marx (This is in most one-volume selections of Marx-Engels). More difficult wor Freedom and Determination in History according to Marx and Engels Joseph Ferraro, Monthly Review Press 2.
Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence G A Cohen 3. Making History Alex Callinicos, Polity Press 4. Marxism and Anthropology Marc Bloch, Oxford University Press. [Top [ Introduction to Marxism ] [ Next: Dialectical Materialism ]
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Research essay sample on English Civil War Relations Of Production
