- Fundamentals of historical materialism – Resistance Books 1999 (PDF document)
Introduction
The purpose of this book is to provide the reader with a general introduction to the fundamental ideas of historical materialism – the Marxist theory of human history and society.
For Marxists the study of human history is inseparable from the study of society.
Human beings, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels noted, “can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence”.1 That is, what distinguishes humans from other animals is that they consciously produce their means of subsistence through the use and fabrication of tools. But in order to do this, they must consciously cooperate with others of their kind. Society, which involves living and working together as an integrated group, is the result of labouring to produce food, clothing and shelter. How human beings have related to each to produce their means of life is the foundation of society and of human history. The fundamental laws of social life are identical, in the Marxist conception, with the fundamental laws that govern human history.
This approach stands in sharp contrast to the dominant approach of bourgeois social “science”, as studied and taught in bourgeois academic institutions. The latter compartmentalises the study of social life into a number of unconnected disciplines such as archaeology, social anthropology, economics, political science, history, and sociology. Within these disciplines further compartmentalisation occurs. Thus “history” is divided into ancient, medieval and modern and into all kinds of history, for example, political history, economic history, cultural history, urban history, agrarian history, etc. Sociology, defined by bourgeois academics as the “study of the origin, development, organisation, and functioning of human society” and as “the science of the fundamental laws of social relations”,2 is divided into dozens of specialised branches none of which is concerned with actually uncovering the fundamental laws which govern the origin, development and organisation of human society.
1. Bourgeois science and reductionism
Bourgeois social “science” is incapable of fulfilling the task of a genuine science of society, i.e., to provide an integral theory of society by revealing the general laws that govern its origin, organisation and development. Indeed, the dominant schools of bourgeois social theory since the beginning of the 20th century have argued that it is fruitless to even attempt to create such a general theory of social development because, they claim, society is simply an accidental collection of atomic individuals and history is nothing more than a record of accidental, unique events. If everything in social life and history is individual and unique then, of course, it would be pointless to even conceive of a science of society and history. The bourgeois atomistic view of society inevitably leads not to scientific explanation, but to mere description, to the ordering and classification of empirical facts on the basis of the subjective likes and dislikes of the individual historian or social commentator.
Contemporary bourgeois thought has lost its earlier confidence in the capacity of human reason to uncover the objective, material causes of social phenomena. Such agnosticism in social theory has an inner connection with the irrationalism that is generated in bourgeois thought by the decay of the capitalist social system, with its deepening spiral of economic chaos, wars and social crises.
The atomistic view of society arises from one side of the contradictory nature of the capitalist social system. Capitalism separates and pits people against one another through the generalised commodification of the means of production and labourpower.
Frederick Engels noted this when he described the crowds in the London streets in his first major work, The Condition of the Working Class in England:
This isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking, is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere … The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle and separate purpose, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.3
This atomisation of social life under capitalism gives rise among its intellectual elite to a reductionist approach to the conception of all phenomena, both natural and social. This reductionist approach is characterised by four basic assumptions:
1. There is a natural set of units or parts of which any object of study is made.
2. These units are homogeneous within themselves, at least as they affect the object of which they are the parts.
3. The parts are ontologically prior to the whole. That is, the parts exist in isolation and come together to make wholes. The parts have intrinsic properties, which they possess in isolation and which they lend to the whole. In the simplest cases the whole is nothing but the sum of its parts; more complex cases allow for interactions of the parts to produce added properties of the whole.
4. Causes are separate from effects, causes being the properties of subjects, and effects the properties of objects. While causes may respond to information coming from effects (so-called “feedback loops”), there is no ambiguity about which is the causing subject and which is the caused object.
This is the conception of the natural world and social life which permeates bourgeois science. It views parts as separate from wholes and reifies parts as isolated things in themselves, as causes separated from effects, as subjects separated from objects. It is an intellectual conception that has been generated by bourgeois social relations.
Beginning with the first stirrings of merchant entrepreneurship in 13th century Europe, and culminating in the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, bourgeois social relations have emphasised the isolated, commodity-owning individual as the primary social actor. By successive acts of enclosure, the mass of the population was separated from the means of production of life’s necessities and reduced to “social atoms”, colliding in the marketplace, each with his or her special interests and properties intrinsic to their role in society.
No individual person, however, is confined to a single role in bourgeois society.
The same people are both consumers and producers, both owners and renters. Yet bourgeois social theory sees society as constructed of homogeneous individual parts, each with only one particular interest. The mass of “consumers” have their interest, “labour” its interest, “capital” its interest, with the whole of capitalist society taking a shape determined by the action of these categories on each other.
The claim that the capitalist social order is the “natural” result of the adjustment of demands and interests of competing interest groups is an ideological formulation meant to make the structure seem inevitable, but it also reflects the social reality that has been constructed. Workers as individuals do compete with each other to sell the only commodity they own, their labour-power, in a market whose terms have been made by struggles between workers and capitalist employers. Consumers do have an interest in the commodities offered to them that is antagonistic to the interest of the producers. But these interest groups have been created by the very system of social relations of which they are said to be the basis.
The reductionist method views the properties of any object of study as reducible to the individual properties of its structural elements, which are regarded as at base homogeneous. Hence an attempt is made to isolate these parts as completely as possible and to study these parts. This underestimates the importance of interaction not only of the parts of the object of study, but of the object of study with all other objects.
The faith in the atomistic nature of the world that lies at the basis of the reductionist approach of bourgeois science makes the allocation of relative weights to separate causes the main aim of science, making it more difficult to study the nature of interconnections. Where simple behaviours emerge out of complex interactions, reductionism takes that simplicity to deny complexity; where the behaviour is bewilderingly complex, it reifies its own confusion into a denial of lawful regularity.
The fundamental error of reductionism as a general point of view is that it supposes that the complex object is somehow “composed” of simple, homogeneous “natural” parts, which exist prior to and in isolation from the object. From this conception of the world, the aim of science is to find those smallest units that are internally homogeneous, the “natural” units of which the world is “composed”.
The history of classical chemistry and physics is the epitome of this bourgeois, atomistic view of the world. In classical chemistry microscopic objects were composed of molecules, each of which was homogeneous within itself. With the development of the atomic theory of matter, these molecules were seen as composed of atoms of different kinds, so the molecules were then seen as internally heterogeneous. Then it appeared that the very atoms defied their name (atomos, indivisible), because they too were internally heterogeneous, being composed of elementary particles – neutrons, protons and elections. But even that homogeneity has disappeared, and the number of “elementary” particles has multiplied with each creation of a more powerful particle accelerator.
2. Dialectics and reductionism
In contrast to the reductionist conception of bourgeois science, Marxism takes a dialectical approach to the study of the natural world and social life. It assumes from the beginning that all things are internally heterogeneous at every level. This heterogeneity does not mean that the object or system is composed of fixed, immutable natural units. Rather, the correct division of the whole into parts must vary, depending upon the particular aspect of the whole that we wish to understand.
It is a matter of simple logic that parts can be parts only when there is a whole for them to be parts of. Part implies whole, and whole implies part. Yet reductionism ignores this relationship, isolating parts as pre-existing units of which wholes are composed. In the real world, however, the two aspects cannot be separated. Indeed, all parts of the physical world are in interaction with each other to some degree, constituting a whole – the material universe.
The first principle of a dialectical view is that whole is a relation of heterogeneous parts that have no prior independent existence as parts. The second principle, which flows from the first, is that, in general, the properties of parts have no prior alienated existence but are acquired by being parts of a particular whole. In the atomistic conception of the world, the intrinsic properties of the alienated parts confer properties on the whole, which may in addition take on new properties that are not characteristic of the parts, i.e., the whole may be more than the sum of the parts. In the dialectical view, the parts have properties that are characteristic of them only as they are parts of wholes: the properties come into existence in the interaction that makes the whole. A person cannot fly by flapping their arms, no matter how much they try. Nor can a group of people fly by flapping their arms simultaneously. But people do fly, as a consequence of a particular socioeconomic formation that has enabled the creation of aircraft, pilots and fuel. It is not the society that flies, however, but individual members of that society, who have acquired a property that they did not have outside of that particular socioeconomic formation. The limitations of individual humans are negated by social interactions. The whole, thus, is not simply the object of interaction of the parts but is the subject of action of the parts.
A third dialectical principle is that wholes are not inherently balanced or harmonious. Their identity is not fixed. Rather they are the loci of internal opposing processes, and the outcome of these opposing processes is balanced only temporarily.
The interpenetration of parts and wholes (parts make wholes, and wholes make parts) is a consequence of the interchangibility of subject and object, of cause and effect.
In the atomistic world of the reductionist, objects are the passive, caused elements of other active, causal subjects. In the bourgeois theory of the evolution of living organisms (the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theory of evolution of species by means of natural selection), organisms are usually seen as the objects of the environment:
Through natural selection, autonomous changes in the environment cause adaptive alterations in the passive organism. In reality, organisms are both subjects and objects of evolution. They both make and are made by their environments (the physical world and other organisms that they interact with) and are thus actors in their own evolutionary history. For example, nearly every present-day terrestrial organism is under strong selection pressure to live in an atmosphere rich in oxygen and poor in carbon dioxide.
But this metabolic problem has been posed by the activity of living organisms themselves over three billion years of evolution. Without the activity of living organisms – producing oxygen by photosynthesis and depleting carbon dioxide by fixing it in the form of carbonates in sedimentary rock – the present-day terrestrial atmosphere would be nearly all carbon dioxide, as is the case with Mars and Venus.
Because elements recreate each other by interacting and are recreated by the wholes of which they are parts, change is a characteristic of all objects and all aspects of objects . This is a fourth dialectical principle.
In bourgeois thought change occupies an apparently contradictory position that follows from the history of the “classical” bourgeois revolutions of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. The triumph of capitalist social relations over feudalism was accompanied by an exuberant, arrogant, and liberating iconoclasm: what was, need not be; ideas do not have to endure. People could change their social position; success came by innovation. But with the consolidation of the dominance of bourgeois social institutions, capitalist society itself was seen as the culmination of social development, the final release of the “intrinsic property” of humanity – the pursuit of private gain through “free trade” – from the fetters of “artificial” feudal restraints. From that point on, change was to be restricted within narrow bounds: making technical innovations, gradual improvement of laws, balancing, adjusting, compromising competing interests.
Legitimation of capitalist society as the “end of history” meant denial of both the need and possibility for fundamental social change. Stability, balance, equilibrium and continuity became positive virtues in society and therefore also the objects of intellectual interest. Change was increasingly seen as superficial, as only appearance, masking some underlying stasis. Even where deep-going change cannot be ignored, it is acknowledged reluctantly and denied with the world-weary aphorism, “The more things change, the more they are the same”.
In the reductionist world outlook, there are constants and variables – those things that are fixed and those that change as a consequence of fixed laws operating with fixed parameter values. In the dialectical world outlook, since all elements (being both subject and object) are changing, constants and variables are not fixed, distinct categories, but relative categories. The time scales of change of different elements may be very different, so that one element has the appearance of being a fixed parameter for the other. Furthermore, the laws and parameters of change themselves change in relation to changes in the object of which they are a part.
In the reductionist world view, entities may change as a consequence of developmental forces, but the forces themselves remain constant or change autonomously as a result of intrinsic developmental properties. In fact, however, the systems that are the objects of laws of transformation become subjects that change these laws. Systems destroy the conditions that brought them about in the first place and create the possibilities of new transformations that did not previously exist. The law that all living things arise from other living things only came into terrestrial existence about one billion years ago. Biotic systems originally arose from inanimate matter, but that origination made its continued occurrence impossible, because the living organisms consumed the complex organic molecules out of which biotic systems could arise from inanimate matter. Moreover, the terrestrial atmosphere that existed before the emergence of living organisms has been “polluted” with reactive oxygen to such an extent that these complex organic molecules rapidly disintegrate outside of living organisms.
The change that is characteristic of all material systems arises from both internal and external relations. The internal heterogeneity of a system may produce a dynamic instability that results in internal development. At the same time the system as a whole is developing in relation to the external world, which changes and is changed by that development. Thus internal and external processes of change affect each other and the system, which is the nexus of these processes.
The dialectical recognition that all objects are internally heterogeneous leads us in two directions. The first is the claim that there are no ultimate units out of which the world is built up – no fixed, homogeneous, primary “building blocks”. This is not a preconception imposed by Marxists on nature but a generalisation from experience:
all previously proposed homogeneous “basic units” have so far turned out to be heterogeneous and the recognition of this fact has opened up new fields for study and practical use. Therefore, the assertion that there are no homogeneous “basic units” points science in the direction of investigating each level of the organisation of matter without having to search for such illusory primary units.
A second consequence of the recognition of the heterogeneity of all systems, whether natural or social, is that it directs us toward an explanation of change in terms of opposing processes united within that system. Heterogeneity is not merely diversity; the parts or processes confront each other as opposites, conditional on the whole of which they are parts.
3. Motion and contradiction
What characterises the dialectical world outlook of Marxism is its recognition that the world, in all its aspects, is constantly in motion. Constants become variables, causes become effects, and systems develop, destroying the conditions that gave rise to them. Even elements that appear to be stable are in a dynamic equilibrium of opposing forces that can suddenly become radically unstable, as when a dull grey lump of metal of a critical mass becomes a fireball brighter than a thousand suns. Yet the motion is not unconstrained and uniform. Organisms develop and differentiate, then die and disintegrate. Species arise but inevitably become extinct (the diversity of species that exist today constitute less than one percent of all those that have ever existed). Even in the less complex physical world there is no evidence of uniform motion.
Motion, change and development are the consequences of the interaction of opposing forces and processes which characterise all things. This central concept of dialectical thought, the principle of contradiction, is the most contentious and difficult of its principles. For the reductionist, contradictions can only exist in our understanding of things or between things, but not as an intrinsic character of things themselves. In the dialectical view, things move, change and develop because of the actions of opposing forces within and upon them, and things are the way they are because of the temporary balance of these opposing forces.
The principle that all things are internally heterogeneous directs our attention to the opposing processes at work within the object. The opposing forces are seen as contradictory in the sense that each taken separately would have opposite effects, and their joint action may be different from the result of either acting alone. But the object is not simply a passive victim of these opposing forces.
The dialectical view insists that persistence and equilibrium are not the normal state of things but require explanation, which must be sought in the actions of opposing forces. The conditions under which the opposing forces balance and the system as a whole is in stable equilibrium are quite special and depend upon the variables within the system not exceeding the parameters of the system. In this case, external events producing small shifts among the variables will be erased by the self-regulating processes of the system.
These opposing processes can now be seen as part of the self-regulation and development of the object. The relations among the stabilising and destabilising processes become themselves the object of interest, and the original object is seen as a system, a network of positive and negative feedback.
The negative feedbacks are the more familiar ones. If the blood pressure of an animal rises, sensors in its kidneys detect the rise and set in motion the processes which reduce blood pressure. If more of a commodity is produced than can be sold, the price of the commodity falls, and the surplus is sold cheaply while production is cut back; if there is a shortage, the price rises, and that stimulates production. In each case a particular state of the system is self-negating in that within the context of the system an increase in something initiates processes that lead to its decrease and maintain the system’s integrity. But systems also contain positive (destabilising) feedback: high blood pressure may damage the pressure-measuring structures, so that blood pressure is underestimated and the homeostatic mechanisms themselves increase the pressure; overproduction may lead to cutbacks in employment, which reduce purchasing power and therefore increase the relative surplus.
Real systems include pathways for both positive and negative feedback. Negative feedbacks are a prerequisite for stability; the persistence of a system requires selfnegating pathways. But negative feedback is no guarantee of stability and under some circumstances – a preponderance of positive feedback or if the indirect negative feedbacks by way of intervening variables are strong enough – the system will become unstable. That is, its own condition is sufficient cause of its negation. Thus systems are either self-negating (state A leads to some state not-A) or depend for their persistence on self-negating processes.
The stability or persistence of a system depends upon a particular balance of positive and negative feedbacks, on parameters governing the rate of processes falling within certain limits. But these parameters, although treated in mathematical models as constants, are real-world objects that are themselves subject to change. Eventually some of these parameters will cross the threshold beyond which the original system can no longer persist as it was. The equilibrium is broken. The system may go into wider and wider fluctuations and break down, or the parts themselves, which have meaning only within a particular whole, may lose their identity as parts and give rise to a qualitatively new system. Further, the changes in the parameters may be a consequence of the stable behaviour of the system that they condition in the first place.
The dialectical world view is that no system is really completely static, although some aspects of a system may be in dynamic equilibrium. The quantitative changes that take place within the apparent stability cross thresholds beyond which the qualitative behaviour is transformed. All systems are in the long run self-negating, while their short-term persistence depends on internal self-negating states.
Self-negation is not simply an abstract possibility derived from arguments about the universality of change. We observe it regularly in nature and society. Monopoly arises not as a result of the thwarting of “free enterprise” but as a consequence of its success; hence the futility of anti-trust and pro-competitive legislation. The freeing of serfs from feudal ties to the land also meant the possibility of their eviction from the land; freedom of the press from the political control of the feudal oligarchy has increasingly meant freedom for the oligarchy of capitalist press barons to control political information and debate. The self-negating processes of capitalism are often expressed as ironic commentaries, as the realisation of ideal goals turns out to thwart their original intent and produce their opposites.
A second aspect of contradiction is the interpenetration of seemingly mutually exclusive categories. A necessary step in theoretical work is to make distinctions. But whenever we divide something into mutually exclusive and jointly all-encompassing categories, it turns out on further examination that these opposites interpenetrate.
Thus at first glance, “deterministic” (necessary) and “random” (chance) processes seem to exemplify mutually exclusive categories. The first implies order and regularity, when the second implies their absence. But processes that seem to be completely deterministic can generate apparently random processes. In fact, the random numbers used for computer simulation of random processes are generated by deterministic processes (algebraic operations). In the last decade, mathematicians have become interested in so-called chaotic motion, which leads neither to equilibrium nor to regular periodic motion but rather to patterns that look random. In systems of high complexity the likelihood of stable equilibrium may be quite small unless the system was explicitly designed for stability. The more common outcome is chaotic motion (turbulence) or periodic motion with periods so long as never to repeat during even long intervals of observation, thus appearing as random.
Second, random processes may have deterministic results. This is actually the basis for predictions about the number of traffic accidents or for actuarial tables. A random process results in some frequency distribution of outcomes. The frequency distribution itself is determined by some parameters, and changes in these parameters have completely determined effects on the distribution. Thus the distribution as an object of study is deterministic even though it is the product of random events.
Third, near thresholds separating domains of very different qualitative phenomena, a small displacement can have a big effect. If these small displacements arise from lower, i.e., less complex, levels of the organisation of matter, they will be unpredictable from the perspective of the higher, more complex, organisations. And in general the intrusion of events from one level to another appears as randomness.
Contradiction also means the coexistence of opposing principles (rather than opposing processes) which, taken together, have very different implications or consequences than they would have if taken separately. Commodities, for example, embody the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value (reflected indirectly in price, in “monetary values”). If objects were produced simply because they met human needs, we would expect the more useful things to be produced before less useful ones, and we would expect objects and methods of production to be designed to minimise any harm or danger and maximise durability or repairability. The amounts produced would correspond to the levels of need; any decline in need would allow either more leisure for those directly engaged in their production or the production of other objects. If objects had no use-value at all, of course, they couldn’t be sold; usevalue makes exchange-value possible. But the prospect of exchange-value leads to results that often contradict the human needs that called forth the commodities in the first place. Commodities will be produced, for example, only for those who can pay for them, and priority will be given to the production of those commodities with the highest profit margins. Productive innovations which make commodities easier and cheaper to make may create unemployment or ill health for workers and consumers.
Thus the process of satisfying human needs by the creation of commodities whose exchange-value is paramount actually leads to the lack of satisfaction of human needs.
4. Human history and natural history
The contrast between the dialectical materialist and the reductionist world views is most sharply seen in their radically different approaches to the question of the relation between human history and natural history. The reductionist view makes the continuity between prehuman and human evolution absolute. The reductionists, as biological determinists, see human affairs as the direct result of biological patterns that evolved in the past, which have created a fixed human nature (supposedly located in our genes) that determines our behaviour and social organisation – with the patterns of behaviour and social organisation that are characteristic of bourgeois society being presented as corresponding to this fixed human nature.
For Marxists the evolution of humans from prehumans presupposes both continuity and discontinuity. Marx insisted that human history was part of natural history. By this he meant that the human species is part of nature and, like other animals, humans have to interact with nature to survive. But humans differ from all other animals by the way in which they go about interacting with nature to sustain themselves. They do this by engaging in labour, i.e., consciously cooperating together to produce their means of subsistence. In doing so, they introduce a discontinuity in natural history – the emergence of a new level of the organisation of matter which is qualitatively different from other forms of animal life, i.e., social life. Labour expresses both humanity’s discontinuity with nature and its continuity with nature.
Labour [Marx observed] is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature.
He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.5
Here is the answer to the basic problem that Marx and Engels began with in their study of human society: how is change in general possible in human society? They found the solution in the actual, practical productive interrelation between humans and nature, in the indisputable fact the very life-process of humanity, individually and collectively, involves a constant interaction by humans with nature to produce their means of life.
In the act and fact of production Marx and Engels saw, as all people may, that humanity not only can, but does, take a hand in the universal process of the redistribution of matter and motion. Thereby humanity demonstrates its material connection and dependence upon nature – but also, and thereby, humans alter nature, and that more or less in accordance with their own will and desires. This not only demonstrated humanity’s “one-ness” with nature, but its dialectical distinction from nature, in the act and fact of their productive opposition of themselves to nature as one of nature’s own forces. More: it demonstrated that nature’s production of change, alteration, and new material formations was no more magical and mysterious than humanity’s productive activity; and, also, that humanity’s power of production was no less “miraculous” than nature’s own.
This approach, applied to the long celebrated “world-riddles” – the origin of humanity, of thought – gave a conception so revolutionary and of such far-reaching profundity that its discovery is easy to miss – and all the critics of Marx and Engels, and 99 percent of the “simplifiers” of Marxism, miss it completely.
Natural science has established that the sum-total of the matter and motion in the universe is a constant quantity. But the fact of the indestructibility of the sum-total of matter and motion in the universe is only the conservative side of a truth which has another and a revolutionary side – the fact that forms of matter, and of motion – including humanity itself – are convertible, capable of radical transformation, and that, given the necessary preconditions, by humans. The “one-ness” of the universe is proved not by its abstract existence, but by this concrete and specific convertibility.
The recognition of the material unity of the universe is not reached by ignoring the multiple differences in the forms of matter and motion: it is demonstrated by the practice of both nature and humanity – which shows these differences to be not “ultimates” but mutable, conditional products of specific material interactions. Nor is it reached in the abstract evolutionism of bourgeois reductionism which first of all resolves all change into an infinity of alterations so minute that they can be ignored and treated as nonexistent. It is reached through the recognition that everything in the universe is the product of an infinite process of dialectical interaction. Only through this conception could humanity, and its thought processes and their historical progression, be brought within the scope of a unitary conception of the universe.
That the self (every person’s consciousness of their own existence) and the notself (the recognition of the existence of a world outside one’s individual consciousness) are “ultimates” is true – in the sense that they and their oppositional relation are presupposed in all human experience. But equally true, and far more revolutionary in significance, is the fact that every act of human practice produces not only objective change, but the subjective alteration of “experience”. And here lies the fact which shatters the agnosticism that today permeates bourgeois philosophy concerning the question of whether our thinking correctly reflects objective reality, wherein it is alleged that the former can at best only “represent” and “symbolise” the latter. Practice, and particularly social cooperation in production-practice, is the generating source of the consciousness of self, and also of the inseparable interrelation between the self and the not-self. People do not need to “prove” by logic the existence of either; both are proved simultaneously and in conjunction by the act and fact of practice – particularly production-practice.
Not that the universe is “ultimately” one whole, but that its immediate, concrete multiplicities show a capacity for being changed and transformed; not that humanity is, being material, one with the universe, but that humanity, because it is material in a material universe, can participate in the universal process of change and transformation, and in doing so can in social combinations use the universe more or less in accordance with human will – this was the revolutionary fact upon which Marx and Engels based their conception of human history.
Marx and Engels did not fall into the error of the “objectivist” (really: contemplationist) error of starting with humanity as a biological species and tracing its evolution from this starting-point to today by means of a string of conjectures. Just as in his analysis of capitalist economy, Marx started with its existing essential relation – that of the commodity – and found therein, on analysis, all the basic relations of bourgeois society, Marx and Engels also found the logical starting point for a scientific analysis of human society and its development, not by conjuring conjectures drawn from the past, but by examining the essential relation of society in the present.
Human beings (as biological specimens) can be “explained” – more or less – with the aid of the fact that humans were evolved as a distinct species by nature. But that of itself will not explain why they advanced beyond that stage. To find an indisputable fact upon which to base not only the theory that society can be changed, but a practical technique for bringing that change about, it was hopelessly irrelevant to look to the fact that what are now humans were once (in the persons of their ancient ancestors) not yet humans. A fact adequate to change the present had to be found actually available in the present. A fact sufficient to account for the existence of society throughout all its stages of development had to be found operating in all stages of human history. Moreover, this had to be such a fact as would from its own nature undergo sufficient changes to account, as well as for the existence of human society, for the sequences of changes, in all their historical multiplicity, which society had undergone.
What fact is there which is actively operating at all periods of human history? A fact sufficiently powerful to keep people in permanent interrelation even when their differences of desire set them flying at each other’s throats? There is only one such fact – the fact of common dependence upon material production.
But Marx and Engels were not concerned only with society as a simple continuity.
They were concerned, and that specifically and practically, with its discontinuity, its sudden jumps from one stage of existence to another. These jumps, which so baffle the “evolutionists” and “gradualists” that they attempt to argue them out of existence, were not only the very things that had to be explained; they were the outward and visible signs that real progress had in fact been achieved, that new forms of society could, and did, actually come into being – that the will to change the world had an objective justification.
That Marx and Engels propounded a conception of history that ascribed the fundamental cause of social evolution to production is well known. What is not so well known, nor appreciated, is that their dialectical materialist conception of history is not so much a theory of social evolution as it is a theory of social revolution, of how people can change their social life to progressively satisfy their material and cultural needs.
All things that are distinctive about humans, from tool-making, speech and thinking to the latest triumphs of art, science and technology, are products of our collective activity over the past several million years. What humans are is the product of human history, of what humans have made and how they have made it. This is what Marx meant when he wrote that the “human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual” but the “ensemble of social relations”, i.e., the totality of social practice.6
Never before in history have human beings been so interdependent upon each other, upon their collective labour activities. Capitalism has socialised the labour process and welded the whole world into one interdependent productive system.
This has been the progressive side of capitalism. It has laid the material social foundations for the free association of all humanity, while at the same time accentuating “dog-eat-dog” competition of each against all by making every human need a commodity in a worldwide market dominated by the drive for private enrichment by a tiny minority of super-rich families.
The social environment is the product of collective human action. It can therefore be changed by the collective action of the working people in order to create a social environment suited to the fundamentally cooperative nature of human social life, a social environment suited to the full satisfaction of the material needs and unhampered cultivation of the physical and mental capabilities of every person. But in order to do this, working people need a scientific understanding of the laws that govern and shape social life. That is what historical materialism provides.