Marx: Historical and Dialectical Materialism

In one line

Marx held that the way a society produces its material life determines its structure and its ideas, and that history moves through the conflicts that arise when the way of producing outgrows the arrangements built on it.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Karl Marx, 1818 to 1883, held that the material conditions of production, rather than ideas, are the foundation of social life. Dialectical materialism is the method: reality is material, it develops through the conflict of opposed tendencies, and change is produced by contradiction within a thing rather than by anything external to it. Historical materialism is that method applied to history: the forces of production develop, come into conflict with the existing relations of production, and the resulting contradiction transforms the entire social order, including its law, politics and ideas.

MU prints "Karl Mar". The name is Karl Marx.

Dialectical materialism: the method

Where it comes from. Hegel held that history is the development of Spirit, proceeding dialectically: a position generates its opposite, and the conflict is resolved in a synthesis which becomes the new position. Marx accepted the dialectical form and rejected the idealist content, holding that the developing thing is not Spirit but material life.

Its propositions.

1. Reality is material. Ideas, beliefs and institutions arise from material conditions rather than the reverse.
2. Everything is in process. Nothing is fixed; every arrangement is a stage.
3. Change comes from internal contradiction. A social order contains, within itself, the opposed tendencies that will transform it. This is the proposition that distinguishes the theory: the cause of change is inside the system, not outside it.
4. Quantitative change becomes qualitative. Accumulated small changes produce a transformation of kind at a certain point.
5. The negation of the negation: the new order preserves elements of what it replaced while transcending it.

Why the method matters for the rest. If change is produced by internal contradiction, then a society's own development produces its transformation, and one need not look for an external cause. That is why Marx's account of history is a story of successive systems each generating its own successor.

Historical materialism: the theory

The starting point. Human beings must produce their subsistence before they can do anything else, so the way they do it is the foundation of everything else. Marx's compressed statement is that it is not the consciousness of people that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.

The components.

The forces of production: the means of production, that is land, raw materials, tools and machinery, together with human labour power and technical knowledge. In short, the society's capacity to produce.

The relations of production: the social relations people enter into in production, above all the relations of ownership and control of the means of production. Who owns, who works, and on what terms.