Karl Marx and the Permutations of Historical Materialism
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Sunday 05 May 2024 is the 206th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx (05 May 1818–14 March 1883), who was born in Trier on this date in 1818.
Perhaps the biggest problem with Marx’s philosophy of history is that almost all the work on it has been done by Marxists, that is to say, by true believers in Marxism. The few who are not true believers who took up historical materialism have done so in the shadow of the work of true believers. This puts non-Marxists who engage with Marx’s philosophy of history in a bind.
It is a practical impossibility to master all the relevant literature on Marx. Anything you say about Marx is likely to be gainsaid by someone who has focused their entire career on Marx. They will have a response to any problem you might raise, but the response is always formulated in a way that is entirely internal to the Marxist conceptual framework. If you don’t share this conceptual framework, the argument is not likely to be persuasive, but it is rare to find someone well versed in Marx’s philosophy of history who is not a Marxist who feels compelled to defend Marx’s view at any cost.
As philosophers of history what we want to know about any thinker is what we can learn from them about their conception of history, not necessarily to defend it, but to know what has been said and why it has been said. And we don’t necessarily want to think ourselves into the conceptual framework internal to some ideology. Compare this situation to any number of other philosophers.
For example, the tradition of commenting on Machiavelli was almost entirely hostile up to the 19th century. Almost no one would cop to Machiavelli’s ideology, even if they admitted to wanting to understand Machiavelli on his own terms. And in my episode on Kant I said that Kant never wrote a big book on philosophy of history, but a Kantian philosophy of history can be assembled from his shorter writings on history. This is similar to the situation with Marx, who didn’t write a book on even an essay specifically on the philosophy of history, but who did leave enough of a trail in his other works so that his conception of history can be reconstructed.
There have been many scholarly studies of Kant’s philosophy of history that maintain the proper distance between the author and the expositor, with no expectation that we are going to become Kantians if we read Kant’s philosophy of history and endeavor to understand it. No one feels the need to toe any Kantian line (though there have been periods in German philosophical history when Neo-Kantian was nearly obligatory), and no one feels obligated to suspend all criticism until they have fully entered into the Kantian conceptual framework. Comprehension does not necessarily entail agreement.
It tends to be different with Marx’s commentators. The vast majority of Marx’s critics have been internal critics. Some of them rise above the mediocrity of that position — for example, Ernst Bloch was an internal critic of Marxism with a mind of his own — but most never find their own voice. The true believers in Marxism view themselves as part of an embattled community and therefore feel the need to defend this community, and this takes the form of defending Marxist doctrines, including defending Marx’s implicit philosophy of history. This isn’t helpful from a philosophical perspective, so we need to keep this in mind. And I will keep in mind that anything I say about Marx might well be contradicted by someone who has a lot invested in Marx.
Probably no one was closer to Marx than Frederick Engels, whom I think we can say closely shared Marx’s conceptual framework, to the point that Marx and Engels are sometimes treated as though they are interchangeable. Engels gave a funeral oration at Marx’s graveside that includes a good summary of Marx’s views on history:
“Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.”
There are several familiar themes here, perhaps most notably the claim that there are laws of human development in history. This is a classic claim of speculative philosophy of history. Also, the emphasis on the material conditions of history as being the forces driving history, and that the material conditions of human history are, effectively, economic conditions, are familiar Marxist talking points. The Preface of The Critique of Political Economy is sometimes identified as the locus classicus of historical materialism:
“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis, on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations, a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. No social formation ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of human society to a close.”
There’s a lot going on in this passage, and I won’t attempt an exhaustive exposition. Instead, I want to pick out a few of Marx’s leading ideas. The leading ideas in Marx’s historical thought could be isolated and taken independently, though they rarely are. Usually, we find them all organically related to each other, each implying the other, as in the quote I just made from The Critique of Political Economy. I want to mention six ideas in particular:
- Materialism
- Cultural evolutionism
- Economic systems as the basis of cultural evolutionism
- The base/superstructure distinction (also known as the infrastructure/superstructure distinction)
- Communist teleology
- Determinism
1. Materialism
I’ve already mentioned that the material conditions of history is a familiar Marxist talking point. There are many passages we could take from Marx to underline this. There are also accounts of Marx that emphasize his debt to Hegel and to Hegel’s idealism. John Zammito in “Philosophy of History: The German Tradition from Herder to Marx” discusses in some detail the influence both of Hegel and Comte, and ends his essay with this:
“In Marx we see a philosophy of history that draws on both the Enlightenment and idealism for its premises. The driving interest in his thought derives from idealism: it is the aspiration to an ethical totality to be realized in the end of history, providing meaning to the entire sweep of history, with all its toil and trouble. But the method that animates his thought is taken from the Enlightenment and its aspiration to a social science based on principles authorized by natural science. Similarly, the radicalism of Marx’s projection of positive values into the future compares with the doctrine of progress of the Enlightenment. Yet, if one takes away the utopianism of Marx’s teleology of history and one takes away the romanticism of his criterion of fulfilled humanity, the balance of his thought has the features of a ‘science’ that falls all the way back to the mechanism of late Enlightenment ‘science of man.’ That was the path that thought on society and history would follow in the balance of the modern period. Indeed, after and through Marx, the question of making sense of history passed definitively out of the hands of philosophy into those of the newly constituted ‘social sciences’.”
I do not agree that, after Marx, the question of making sense of history passed definitively out of the hands of philosophy, but I think I can see what Zammito was getting at. We can find some basis for this replacement of philosophy by science in Marx:
“History itself is an actual part of natural history, of nature’s development into man, Natural science will in time include the science of man as the science of man will include natural science: There will be one science.”
Max Weber, after Marx, called for a rationalization of history that was not a philosophy of history, and Weber’s work on the methodology of the social sciences has been extremely influential. But whether Weber, or any other post-Marxian social scientist, managed to displace philosophy as a sense-making tool for history is not at all clear. Certainly this is not a proposition with which most philosophers of history will agree.
Another interesting thing in this quote from Zammito is his suggestion of setting aside Marx’s utopianism and teleology. This is exactly what I am trying to show: that there are many permutations of the Marxist conception of history, based not only on our interpretations of the elements of Marx’s thought, but which elements we include and which elements we set aside as being no longer relevant.
2. Cultural Evolutionism
Now I will move on from Marx’s materialism to his cultural evolutionism. Like Marx’s theory of history, his exposition of cultural evolutionism is scattered across many texts and appears in a fragmentary form, but it is well enough established that the idea that human society passes through stages from primitive communism to slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, with Marx positing a further stage of industrialized communism after capitalism. Because Marx’s exposition is unsystematic, there are many slightly different accounts of the stages in Marx’s cultural evolutionism.
The rival to Marx’s cultural evolutionism is Franz Boas’ cultural relativism. The contrast of Marx’s evolutionism and Boas’ relativism helps to give us a sense of what is at stake in Marx’s claims. We could say that we have both evolutionist intuitions about history and relativist intuitions about history, and Marx and Boas each build on these distinct intuitions, and, as they build on these divergent intuitions, the more their thought diverges the farther we follow the reasoning of either of them.
Both Marx’s cultural evolutionism and Boas’ cultural relativism have become so familiar to us that we scarcely realize when we are invoking either of them, but we should be clear about when our historical thinking is implicitly invoking either evolutionism or relativism, or both. Sometimes we find both in one person. For example, Spengler’s philosophy of history has elements in it that are derived from both cultural evolutionism and cultural relativism, and so we can find in his philosophy echoes of both Marx and Boas. Specifically, Spengler’s idea that all civilizations rise up from an undifferentiated mass of history and are incommensurable with any other civilization is akin to cultural relativism, while Spengler’s contention that all civilizations pass through definite stages in a determinate order is akin to cultural evolutionism. The two — evolutionism and relativism — are not necessarily mutually exclusive, though when we build exclusively on one set of historical intuitions or another, and these forms of thought diverge, they seem to be irreconcilable.
3. Economic Systems as the Basis of Cultural Evolutionism
Marx’s cultural evolutionism is driven by economic systems, and economic systems grow out of the satisfaction of human needs. It would be possible to formulate a conception of history defined by cultural evolutionism, but in which it is not economics, but something else that is the driver of the historical process. Here we see the relationship between Marx’s materialism and the other components of his conception of history, since any alternative to a system of economics that grows out of human needs would need to appeal to mind, or consciousness, or ideals of some kind.
Jacob’s Burckhardt’s conception of history, while not being a form of cultural evolutionism, does place the mind and its ideals as the drivers of history, and so presents us with an example of a conception of history in which economics and industry are only distant, secondary, and mediate causes in the development of the historical process. Burckhardt’s conception of historical development is as antithetical to Marx’s conception of human development as Boas’ cultural relativism is antithetical to Marx’s cultural evolutionism.
4. The Base/Superstructure Distinction
Because the economic systems grow out of the satisfaction of human needs, and this is the primary driver of the historical process, it follows that this is the basis of the entirety of society. The apparently non-economic functions of society like art, religion, science, law, and political institutions are not really independent of economic forces, but are in fact created by economic forces. The ideals to which we believe we are giving expression in the highest cultural productions of a society are not something independent of human needs, but are part of the rationalization and justification of the economic order of society.
In this way, these cultural expressions of a society are mere epiphenomena of the economic base of society. Their purpose is to make us feel good about ourselves and to justify the economic exploitation that makes them possible. It is this idea that Walter Benjamin presumably had in mind when he said that every document of civilization is at the same time a document of barbarism. As a cultural critic, Benjamin could appreciate the high culture productions of society, but he believed himself to have seen through the violence, oppression, and suffering entailed by their creation.
This is, we could say, a highly reductionist account of art and ideals and intellectual achievement. Varieties of Marxism that have flourished after Marx’s time, like Antonio Gramsci’s cultural Marxism, value the productions of culture differently, so Marxism doesn’t necessarily have to involve a reductionist account of non-economic value.
5. Communist Teleology
In Marx, the process of cultural evolutionism culminates in communism. There are several accounts of how exactly this comes about, and how many stages intervene between communist revolution and the achievement of a final communist society — for example, whether the expropriation of the expropriators leads directly to communism, or whether a society must pass through a period of the dictatorship of the proletariat before the state can wither away and true communism will be achieved, and how long the dictatorship of the proletariat has to endure, or how long it takes the state to wither away. However it comes about, communism is the end point of cultural evolutionism.
In Marx, cultural evolutionism, as we have seen, is expressed in a series of distinct economic systems, or relations of production. Once a society achieves the communist mode of production it has achieved its final form. Marx need not have made this assertion. We could just as well argue that communism is one more mode of production, which will eventually be followed by another mode of production in its turn. If the other mode of production is something unprecedented in history, then history is still directional, but does not necessarily converge on a finite teleology. We could even posit an infinitude of stages of economic development following capitalism and communism.
Alternatively, it could be argued that communism is a stage in a cycle of stages that repeat over historical time, which would give us a cyclical theory of history. For example, if the attainment of a perfect communist society coincided with the primitive communism prior to the slave mode of production, then the whole cycle would start over, and this would not be a form of teleology.
6. Determinism
Marx’s philosophy of history is usually taken to be deterministic. Partly this is because cultural evolutionism is widely believed to be essentially deterministic. This belief is false, because we could easily formulate cultural evolutionism in a non-deterministic way. We need not be deterministic about cultural evolutionism any more than we need to be deterministic about biological evolutionism. The determinist argument can be made, but it’s not obvious or necessary.
It is nevertheless true that many who are argued for cultural evolutionism have offered deterministic accounts of the origins and development of societies, and Marx’s account certainly suggests this. Whenever we find a claim of inevitability, we are in the presence of determinism, and we find many claims of inevitability in Marx. For example, this from Capital:
“…there can be no doubt that when the working-class comes into power, as inevitably it must, technical instruction, both theoretical and practical, will take its proper place in the working-class schools.”
There are many ways in which historical materialism could be formulated in which it was not deterministic, but still largely accommodated Marx’s insights. For example, one could hold that a society might collapse at any stage of its development, with this collapse being a contingent event, not determined by prior circumstances. If a society can collapse at any point in its development, and does not necessarily pass through all stages of cultural evolutionism in a determinate order, and does not necessarily pass through all of these stages, then Marx’s cultural evolutionism ceases to be deterministic.
If we take these six elements in Marx’s historical thought I have discussed so far:
- Materialism
- Cultural evolutionism
- Economic systems as the basis of cultural evolutionism
- Base/superstructure distinction
- Communist teleology
- Determinism
And pair each of these with its antithesis, which might be the list something like this:
- Idealism
- Cultural relativism
- Historical development not driven by economics
- Consciousness and its ideals as the basis of social institutions
- Denial of teleology
- Indeterminism
There are 64 possible permutations of these elements, and that means a possibility of 64 philosophies of history that overlap with Marx’s philosophy of history, more or less related to Marx, but not precisely coinciding to Marx. Because of the party spirit that animates Marxist thought, we rarely see these closely related alternatives being explored, though, as we saw in the quote from John Zammito, sometimes philosophers will set aside of aspects of Marx’s thought in order to arrive at a more satisfactory formulation.
Some of these permutations would be unlikely to say the least, but all could give us a novel perspective on Marx and historical materialism. But there are many ways to approach Marx’s conception of history. Another potentially profitable way to approach Marx from the perspective of philosophy of history would be Marx’s conception of revolution. I opened by quoting Engels’ funeral oration for Marx, and in the same funeral oration Engels’ commented on Marx’s commitment to revolution:
“…Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being…”
As a revolution, even an anticipated or precipitated revolution, is an historical crisis, Marx could be assimilated to those philosophers of history who have focused on crisis. But that will have to wait for another time.
