Marxist historiography
Marxist historiography, or historical materialist historiography, is an influential school of historiography. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography include the centrality of social class, social relations of production in class-divided societies that struggle against each other, and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes. Marxist historians follow the tenets of the development of class-divided societies, especially modern capitalist ones.
Marxist historiography has developed in varied ways across different regional and political contexts. It has had unique trajectories of development in the West, the Soviet Union, and in India, as well as in the pan-Africanist and African-American traditions, adapting to these specific regional and political conditions in different ways. Marxist historiography has made contributions to the history of the working class, and the methodology of a history from below.
Marxist historiography is sometimes criticized as deterministic, in that it posits a direction of history, towards an end state of history as classless human society. Marxist historiography within Marxist circles is generally seen as a tool; its aim is to bring those it perceives as oppressed by history to self-consciousness, and to arm them with tactics and strategies from history. For these Marxists, it is both a historical and a liberatory project.
Not all Marxist historiography is socialist. Methods from Marxist historiography, such as class analysis, can be divorced from the original political intents of Marxism and its perceived deterministic nature; historians who use Marxist methodology but disagree with the politics of Marxism often describe themselves as Marxian historians, and practitioners of this Marxian historiography often refer to their techniques as Marxian.
Marx and Engels
' most important historical contribution to the development of Marxist historiography was Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg, which analysed social warfare in early Protestant Germany in terms of emerging capitalist classes. Although The German Peasants' War was overdetermined and lacked a rigorous engagement with archival sources, it exemplifies an early Marxist interest in history from below and in class analysis; it also attempts a dialectical analysis.Karl Marx contributed important works on social and political history, including The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology, and those chapters of Das Kapital dealing with the historical emergence of capitalists and proletarians from pre-industrial English society.
Labour and class struggle
The key to understanding Marxist historiography is his view of labour. For Marx "historical reality is none other than objectified labour, and all conditions of labour given by nature, including the organic bodies of people, are merely preconditions and 'disappearing moments' of the labour process." This emphasis on the physical as the determining factor in history represents a break from virtually all previous historians. Until Marx developed his theory of historical materialism, the overarching determining factor in the direction of history was some sort of divine agency. In Marx's view of history "God became a mere projection of human imagination" and more importantly "a tool of oppression". There was no more sense of divine direction to be seen. History moved by the sheer force of human labour, and all theories of divine nature were a concoction of the ruling powers to keep the working people in check. For Marx, "The first historical act is... the production of material life itself." As one might expect, Marxist history not only begins with labour, it ends in production: "history does not end by being resolved into "self-consciousness" as "spirit of the spirit," but that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, a historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor..." For further, and much more comprehensive, information on this topic, see historical materialism.Historical materialism
Introduction
Historical materialism is a methodology to understand human societies and their development throughout history. Marx's theory of history locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labour together to make their livelihoods. Marx argues that the introduction of new technologies and new ways of doing things to improve production eventually lead to new social classes which in turn result in political crises which can threaten the established order.Marx's view of history is in contrast to the commonplace notion that the rise and fall of kingdoms, empires and states, can broadly be explained by the actions, ambitions and policies of the people at the top of society; kings, queens, emperors, generals, or religious leaders. This view of history is summed up by the 19th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle who wrote "the history of the world is nothing but the biography of great men". An alternative to the "great man" theory is that history is shaped by the motivating force of "great ideas" – the struggle of reason over superstition or the fight for democracy and freedom.
The "great man" and "great women" theory of history and the view that history is primarily shaped by ideas has provoked no end of debate but many historians have believed there are more fundamental patterns at play beneath historical events.
Marx asserted that the material conditions of a society's mode of production, or in Marxist terms a society's productive forces and relations of production, fundamentally determine society's organization and development including the political commitments, cultural ideas and values that dominate in any society.
Marx argues that there is a fundamental conflict between the class of people who create the wealth of society and those who have ownership or control of the means of production, decide how society's wealth and resources are to be used and have a monopoly of political and military power. Historical materialism provides a profound challenge to the view that the historical process has come to a close and that capitalism is the end of history. Since Marx's time, the theory has been modified and expanded. It now has many Marxist and non-Marxist variants.
The main modes of production that Marx identified generally include primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, mercantilism, and capitalism. In each of these social stages, people interacted with nature and production in different ways. Any surplus from that production was distributed differently as well. To Marx, ancient societies were based on a ruling class of citizens and a class of slaves; feudalism was based on nobles and serfs; and capitalism based on the capitalist class and the working class.
Description
Historical materialism builds upon the idea of historical progress that became popular in philosophy during the Enlightenment, which asserted that the development of human society has progressed through a series of stages, from hunting and gathering, through pastoralism and cultivation, to commercial society. Historical materialism rests on a foundation of dialectical materialism, in which matter is considered primary and ideas, thought, and consciousness are secondary, i.e. consciousness and human ideas about the universe result from material conditions rather than vice versa. Marxism uses this materialist methodology, referred to by Marx and Engels as the materialist conception of history and later better known as historical materialism, to analyse the underlying causes of societal development and change from the perspective of the collective ways in which humans make their living.Historical materialism springs from a fundamental underlying reality of human existence: that in order for subsequent generations of human beings to survive, it is necessary for them to produce and reproduce the material requirements of everyday life. Marx then extended this premise by asserting the importance of the fact that, in order to carry out production and exchange, people have to enter into very definite social relations, or more specifically, "relations of production". However, production does not get carried out in the abstract, or by entering into arbitrary or random relations chosen at will, but instead are determined by the development of the existing forces of production.
How production is accomplished depends on the character of society's productive forces, which refers to the means of production such as the tools, instruments, technology, land, raw materials, and human knowledge and abilities in terms of using these means of production. The relations of production are determined by the level and character of these productive forces present at any given time in history. In all societies, Human beings collectively work on nature but, especially in class societies, do not do the same work. In such societies, there is a division of labour in which people not only carry out different kinds of labour but occupy different social positions on the basis of those differences. The most important such division is that between manual and intellectual labour whereby one class produces a given society's wealth while another is able to monopolize control of the means of production and so both governs that society and lives off of the wealth generated by the labouring classes.
Marx's account of the theory is in The German Ideology and in the preface A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. All constituent features of a society are assumed to stem from economic activity, forming what is considered as the base and superstructure. The base and superstructure metaphor describes the totality of social relations by which humans produce and re-produce their social existence. According to Marx, the "sum total of the forces of production accessible to men determines the condition of society" and forms a society's economic base.
The base includes the material forces of production such as the labour, means of production and relations of production, i.e. the social and political arrangements that regulate production and distribution. From this base rises a superstructure of legal and political "forms of social consciousness" that derive from the economic base that conditions both the superstructure and the dominant ideology of a society. Conflicts between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production provokes social revolutions, whereby changes to the economic base leads to the social transformation of the superstructure.
This relationship is reflexive, in that the base initially gives rise to the superstructure and remains the foundation of a form of social organization. Those newly formed social organizations can then act again upon both parts of the base and superstructure so that rather than being static, the relationship is dialectic, expressed and driven by conflicts and contradictions. Engels clarified: "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 one another, carried on uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."
Marx considered recurring class conflicts as the driving force of human history as such conflicts have manifested themselves as distinct transitional stages of development in Western Europe. Accordingly, Marx designated human history as encompassing four stages of development in relations of production:
- Primitive communism: co-operative tribal societies.
- Slave society: development of tribal to city-state in which aristocracy is born.
- Feudalism: aristocrats are the ruling class while merchants evolve into the bourgeoisie.
- Capitalism: capitalists are the ruling class, who create and employ the proletariat.