Chiefs of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, a vital influence on and precursor to Marxist communism.
While Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined communism as a political movement, there were already similar ideas in the past which one could call communist experiments. Marx himself saw primitive communism as the original hunter-gatherer state of humankind. Marx theorized that only after humanity was capable of producing surplus did private property develop.
Karl Marx and other early communist theorists believed that hunter-gatherer societies as were found in the Paleolithic through to horticultural societies as found in the Chalcolithic were essentially egalitarian and he, therefore, termed their ideology to be primitive communism. Since Marx, sociologists and archaeologists have developed the idea of and research on primitive communism. According to Harry W. Laidler, one of the first writers to espouse a belief in the primitive communism of the past was the RomanStoic philosopher Seneca
who stated, "How happy was the primitive age when the bounties of
nature lay in common ... They held all nature in common which gave them
secure possession of the public wealth." Because of this he believed that such primitive societies were the richest as there was no poverty. According to Erik van Ree, other Greco-Roman writers that expressed a belief in a prehistoric humanity that had a communist-like societal structure include Diodorus Siculus, Virgil, and Ovid.
Due to the strong evidence of an egalitarian society, lack of hierarchy and lack of economic inequality, historian Murray Bookchin has argued that Çatalhöyük was an early example of anarcho-communism, and so an example of primitive communism in a proto-city.
Bronze Age
It has been argued that the Indus Valley civilisation is an example of a primitive communist society, due to its perceived lack of conflict and social hierarchies. Others argue that such an assessment of the Indus Valley civilisation is not correct.
The 1st century BC Roman philosopher Seneca believed that humans had fallen from a Golden Age of primitive communism
The idea of a classless and stateless society based on communal
ownership of property and wealth also stretches far back in Western
thought long before The Communist Manifesto. There are scholars who have traced communist ideas back to ancient times, particularly in the work of Pythagoras and Plato.
Followers of Pythagoras, for instance, lived in one building and held
their property in common because the philosopher taught the absolute
equality of property with all worldly possessions being brought into a
common store.
It is argued that Plato's Republic
described in great detail a communist-dominated society wherein power
is delegated in the hands of intelligent philosopher or military
guardian class and rejected the concept of family and private property. In a social order divided into warrior-kings and the Homeric demos
of craftsmen and peasants, Plato conceived an ideal Greek city-state
without any form of capitalism and commercialism with business
enterprise, political plurality, and working-class unrest considered as
evils that must be abolished.
While Plato's vision cannot be considered a precursor of communist
thinking, his utopian speculations are shared by other utopian thinkers
later on.
An important feature that distinguishes Plato's ideal society in the
Republic is that the ban on private property applies only to the
superior classes (rulers and warriors), not to the general public.
The early Church Fathers, like their non-Abrahamic predecessors, maintained that human society had declined to its current state from a now lost egalitarian social order. There are those who view that the early Christian Church, such as that one described in the Acts of the Apostles (specifically Acts 2:44–45 and Acts 4:32–45) was an early form of communism. The view is that communism was just Christianity in practice and Jesus Christ was himself a communist.
This link was highlighted in one of Marx's early writings which stated:
"As Christ is the intermediary unto whom man unburdens all his
divinity, all his religious bonds, so the state is the mediator unto
which he transfers all his Godlessness, all his human liberty". Furthermore, the Marxist ethos that aims for unity reflects the Christian universalist teaching that humankind is one and that there is only one god who does not discriminate among people. Later historians have supported the reading of early church communities as communistic in structure.
Pre-Marxist communism was also present in the attempts to
establish communistic societies such as those made by the ancient Jewish
sects the Essenes and by the Judean desert sect.
Post-classical history
Inside the urban centre Kuélap of the Chachapoya culture.
Europe
Peter Kropotkin argued that the elements of mutual aid and mutual defense expressed in the medieval commune of the Middle Ages and its guild system were the same sentiments of collective self-defense apparent in modern anarchism, communism and socialism. From the High Middle Ages in Europe, various groups supporting Christian communist and communalist ideas were occasionally adopted by reformist Christian sects. An early 12th century proto-Protestant group originating in Lyon known as the Waldensians held their property in common in accordance with the Book of Acts, but were persecuted by the Catholic Church and retreated to Piedmont. Around 1300 the Apostolic Brethren in northern Italy were taken over by Fra Dolcino who formed a sect known as the Dulcinians which advocated ending feudalism, dissolving hierarchies in the church, and holding all property in common. The Peasants' Revolt in England has been an inspiration for "the medieval ideal of primitive communism", with the priest John Ball of the revolt being an inspirational figure to later revolutionaries and having allegedly declared, "things cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until all goods are held in common."
The Chachapoya culture
indicated an egalitarian non-hierarchical society through a lack of
archaeological evidence and a lack of power expressing architecture that
would be expected for societal leaders such as royalty or aristocracy.
Asia
Mazdak, a Sasanian prophet who founded the eponymous Zoroastrian offshoot of Mazdakism, is argued by various historical sources, including Muhammad Iqbal, to have been a proto-communist. This view originates from Mazdak's belief in the abolition of private property, advocacy of social revolution, and criticism of the clergy.
Researchers have commented on the communistic nature of the society built by the Qarmatians around Al-Ahsa from the 9th to 10th centuries.
In the 16th century, English writer Sir Thomas More portrayed a society based on common ownership of property in his treatise Utopia, whose leaders administered it through the application of reason. Several groupings in the English Civil War supported this idea, but especially the Diggers who espoused communistic and agrarian ideals. Oliver Cromwell and the Grandees' attitude to these groups was at best ambivalent and often hostile. Engels considered the Levellers of the English Civil War as a group representing the proletariat fighting for a utopian socialist society. Though later commentators have viewed the Levellers as a bourgeois group that did not seek a socialist society.
During the Age of Enlightenment in 18th century France, some liberal writers increasingly began to criticize the institution of private property even to the extent they demanded its abolition. Such writings came from thinkers such as the deeply religious philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his hugely influential The Social Contract
(1762) Rousseau outlined the basis for a political order based on
popular sovereignty rather than the rule of monarchs, and in his Discourse on Inequality
(1755) inveighed against the corrupting effects of private property
claiming that the invention of private property had led to the, "crimes,
wars, murders, and suffering" that plagued civilization. Raised a Calvinist, Rousseau was influenced by the Jansenist movement within the Roman Catholic Church.
The Jansenist movement originated from the most orthodox Roman Catholic
bishops who tried to reform the Roman Catholic Church in the 17th
century to stop secularization and Protestantism. One of the main Jansenist aims was democratizing to stop the aristocratic corruption at the top of the Church hierarchy.
Victor d'Hupay's 1779 work Project for a Philosophical Community described a plan for a communal experiment in Marseille where all private property was banned. d'Hupay referred to himself as a communiste, the French form of the word "communist", in a 1782 letter, the first recorded instance of that term.
North America
Ely S. Parker, co-author of The League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois
Lewis Henry Morgan's descriptions of "communism in living" as practiced by the Haudenosaunee of North America, through research enabled by and coauthored with Ely S. Parker, were viewed as a form of pre-Marxist communism. Morgan's works were a primary inspiration for Marx and Engel's description of primitive communism, and has led to some believing that early communist-like societies also existed outside of Europe, in Native American society and other pre-Colonized societies in the Western hemisphere. Though the belief of primitive communism as based on Morgan's work is flawed due to Morgan's misunderstandings of Haudenosaunee society and his, since proven wrong, theory of social evolution.
This, and subsequent more accurate research, has led to the society of
the Haudenosaunee to be of interest in communist and anarchist analysis. Particularly aspects where land was not treated as a commodity, communal ownership and near non-existent rates of crime.
Primitive communism meaning societies that practiced economic cooperation among the members of their community,
where almost every member of a community had their own contribution to
society and land and natural resources would often be shared peacefully
among the community. Some such communities in North America and South
America still existed well into the 20th century. Historian Barry
Pritzker lists the Acoma, Cochiti and IsletaPuebloans as living in socialist-like societies. It is assumed modern egalitarianism seen in Pueblo communities stems from this historic socio-economic structure. David Graeber has also commented that the Inuit have practiced communism and fended off unjust hierarchy for "thousands of years".
Age of Revolution
Louise Michel, a communard who supported the 1878 Kanak insurrection whilst exiled from France.
The Shakers of the 18th century under Joseph Meacham developed and practiced their own form of communalism, as a sort of religious communism, where property had been made a "consecrated whole" in each Shaker community.
The currents of thought in French philosophy from the Enlightenment from Rousseau and d'Hupay proved influential during the French Revolution of 1789 in which various anti-monarchists, particularly the Jacobins, supported the idea of redistributing wealth equally among the people, including Jean-Paul Marat and Francois Babeuf. The latter was involved in the Conspiracy of the Equals
of 1796 intending to establish a revolutionary regime based on communal
ownership, egalitarianism and the redistribution of property. Babeuf was directly influenced by Morelly's anti-property utopian novel The Code of Nature and quoted it extensively, although he was under the erroneous impression it was written by Diderot. Also during the revolution the publisher Nicholas Bonneville, the founder of the Parisian revolutionary Social Club used his printing press to spread the communist treatises of Restif and Sylvain Maréchal. Maréchal, who later joined Babeuf's conspiracy, would state it his Manifesto of the Equals
(1796), "we aim at something more sublime and more just, the COMMON
GOOD or the COMMUNITY OF GOODS" and "The French Revolution is just a
precursor of another revolution, far greater, far more solemn, which
will be the last." Restif also continued to write and publish books on the topic of communism throughout the Revolution.
Accordingly, through their egalitarian programs and agitation Restif,
Maréchal, and Babeuf became the progenitors of modern communism.
Babeuf's plot was detected, however, and he and several others involved
were arrested and executed. Because of his views and methods, Babeuf
has been described as an anarchist, communist and a socialist by later
scholars. The word "communism" was first used in English by Goodwyn Barmby in a conversation with those he described as the "disciples of Babeuf". Despite the setback of the loss of Babeuf, the example of the French Revolutionary regime and Babeuf's doomed insurrection was an inspiration for French socialist thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc, Charles Fourier and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon, the founder of modern anarchism and libertarian socialism would later famously declare "property is theft!" a phrase first invented by the French revolutionary Brissot de Warville.
Maximilien Robespierre and his Reign of Terror,
aimed at exterminating the monarchy, nobility, clergy, conservatives
and nationalists was admired among some anarchists, communists and
socialists. In his turn, Robespierre was a great admirer of Voltaire and Rousseau.
By the 1830s and 1840s in France, the egalitarian concepts of communism and the related ideas of socialism
had become widely popular in revolutionary circles thanks to the
writings of social critics and philosophers such as Pierre Leroux and Théodore Dézamy, whose critiques of bourgeois liberalism and individualism led to a widespread intellectual rejection of laissez-fairecapitalism on economic, philosophical and moral grounds.
According to Leroux writing in 1832, "To recognise no other aim than
individualism is to deliver the lower classes to brutal exploitation.
The proletariat is no more than a revival of antique slavery." He also
asserted that private ownership of the means of production allowed for
the exploitation of the lower classes and that private property was a
concept divorced from human dignity.
It was only in the year 1840 that proponents of common ownership in
France, including the socialists Théodore Dézamy, Étienne Cabet, and Jean-Jacques Pillot began to widely adopt the word "communism" as a term for their belief system. Those inspired by Étienne Cabet created the Icarian movement,
setting up communities based on non-religious communal ownership in
various states across the US, the last of these communities located a
few miles outside Corning, Iowa, disbanded voluntarily in 1898.
Marx saw communism as the original state of mankind from which it rose through classical society and then feudalism to its current state of capitalism. He proposed that the next step in social evolution would be a return to communism.
In its contemporary form, communism grew out of the workers' movement of 19th-century Europe. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, socialist critics blamed capitalism
for creating a class of poor, urban factory workers who toiled under
harsh conditions and for widening the gulf between rich and poor.
Historical materialism is Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx located historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods.
Marx's lifetime collaborator, Friedrich Engels,
coins the term "historical materialism" and describes it as "that view
of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great
moving power of all important historic events in the economic
development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and
exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes,
and in the struggles of these classes against one another."
Although Marx never brought together a formal or comprehensive
description of historical materialism in one published work, his key
ideas are woven into a variety of works from the 1840s onward. Since Marx's time, the theory has been modified and expanded. It now has many Marxist and non-Marxist variants.
Enlightenment views of history
Marx's view of history was shaped by his engagement with the intellectual and philosophical movement known as the Age of Enlightenment
and the profound scientific, political, economic and social
transformations that took place in Britain and other parts of Europe in
the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.
The "spirit of liberty"
Enlightenment
thinkers responded to the worldly transformations by promoting
individual liberties and attacking religious dogmas and the divine right
of kings. A group of thinkers including Hobbes (1588–1679), Montesquieu (1689–1755), Voltaire (1694–1778), Smith (1723–1790), Turgot (1727–1781) and Condorcet
(1743–1794) explored new forms of inquiry, including empirical studies
of human nature, history, economics and society. Some philosophers, for
example, Vico (1668–1744), Herder (1744–1803) and Hegel (1770–1831), sought to uncover organizing principles of human history in underlying themes, meanings, and directions.
For many Enlightenment philosophers, the power of ideas became the
mainspring for understanding historical change and the rise and fall of
civilizations. History was the gradual advance of the "spirit of
liberty" or the growth of nationalism or democracy, rationality and law. This view of history remains popular to this day.
Marx 's ideas were also influenced by his reading of Young Hegelian writer Ludwig Feuerbach's 1833 work Geschichte der neuern Philosophie von Bacon von Verulam bis Benedict Spinoza which covered Gassendi's materialist philosophy as well as Gassendi's treatment on materialist Ancient Greek philosophers such as Epicurus, Leucippus, and Democritus.
Materialist conception of history
Inspired by Enlightenment thinkers, especially Condorcet, the utopian socialistHenri de Saint-Simon
(1760–1825) formulated his own materialist interpretation of history,
similar to those later used in Marxism, analyzing historical epochs
based on their level of technology and organization and dividing them
between eras of slavery, serfdom, and finally wage labor. According to the socialist leader Jean Jaurès, the French writer Antoine Barnave was the first to develop the theory that economic forces were the driving factors in history.
Marx came to his commitment to a materialist analysis of society and political economy around 1844 and completed his works The Holy Family in 1845, The German Ideology or Leipzig Council in 1846, and The Poverty of Philosophy in 1847 along with Friedrich Engels.
'Great man' history
Marx
rejected the enlightenment view that ideas alone were the driving force
in society or that the underlying cause of change was guided by the
actions of leaders in government or religion. The "great man" and
occasionally "great woman" view of historical change was popularized by
the 19th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) who wrote "the history of the world is nothing but the biography of great men".
According to Marx, this conception of history amounted to nothing more
than a collection of "high-sounding dramas of princes and states".
Hegel's contribution to Marx's theory of history
While studying at the University of Berlin, Marx encountered the philosophy of Hegel
(1770–1831) which had a profound and lasting influence on his thinking.
One of Hegel's key critiques of enlightenment philosophy was that while
thinkers were often able to describe what made societies from one epoch
to the next different, they struggled to account for why they changed.
Hegel and historicism
Classical economists presented a model of civil society based on a universal and unchanging human nature.
Hegel challenged this view and argued that human nature as well as the
formulations of art, science and the institutions of the state and its
codes, laws and norms were all defined by their history and could only
be understood by examining their historical development.
Hegel’s philosophical thought saw it as an expression of a specific
culture rather than an eternal truth: "Philosophy is its own age
comprehended in thought."
World spirit
In
each society, humans were 'free by nature" but constrained by their
"brutal recklessness of passion" and "untamed natural impulses" that led
to injustice and violence.
It was only through wider society and the state, which was expressed in
each historical epoch, by a "spirit of the age", collective
consciousness or geist, that "Freedom" could be realized.
For Hegel, history was the working through of a process where humans
become ever more conscious of the rational principles that govern social
development.
Hegel's dialectical method presents the world as a complex totality
where all aspects of society (familial, economic, scientific,
governmental, etc.) are interconnected, mutually influential, and unable
to be considered in isolation.
According to Hegel, at any particular point in time, society is an
amalgam of contesting forces – some promoting stability and others
striving for change. It is not just external factors that bring about
transformation but internal contradictions. The unceasing drive of this
dynamic is played out by real people struggling to achieve their aims.
The outcome is that ideas, institutions and bodies of society are
reconfigured into new forms expressing new characteristics. At certain
decisive moments in history, during periods of great conflict, the
actions of "great historical men" can align with the "spirit of the age"
to bring about a fundamental advance in freedom.
Algebra of revolution
A caricature drawn by Engels of Max Stirner, whose 1844 work The Unique and its Property prompted Marx and Engels to theorize a scientific approach to the study of history which they first laid out in The German Ideology (1845) along with a lengthy rebuttal of Stirner
The implication of Hegel's philosophy that every social order, no
matter how powerful and secure, will eventually wither away was
incendiary. These ideas were inspirational to Marx and the Young Hegelians
who sought to develop a radical critique of the Prussian authorities
and their failure to introduce constitutional change or reform social
institutions.
However, Hegel's contention that ideas or the "spirit of the age" drive
history was mistaken in Marx's view. Hegel, wrote Marx, "fell into the
illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought..."
Marx contended that the engine of history was to be found in a
materialist understanding of society - the productive process and the
way humans labored to meet their needs. Marx and Engels first set out
their materialist conception of history in The German Ideology, written in 1845. The book is a lengthy polemic against Marx and Engels' fellow Young Hegelians and contemporaries Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner.
Historical materialism
In the Marxian view, human history is like a river. From any given
vantage point, a river looks much the same day after day. But actually
it is constantly flowing and changing, crumbling its banks, widening and
deepening its channel. The water seen one day is never the same as that
seen the next. Some of it is constantly being evaporated and drawn up,
to return as rain. From year to year these changes may be scarcely
perceptible. But one day, when the banks are thoroughly weakened and the
rains long and heavy, the river floods, bursts its banks, and may take a
new course. This represents the dialectical part of Marx's famous
theory of dialectical (or historical) materialism.
Marx based his theory of history on the necessity of labor to ensure physical survival. In The German Ideology,
Marx wrote that the first historical act, was the production of means
to satisfy material needs and that labor is a "fundamental condition of
all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and
hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life".
Human labor forms the materialist basis for society and is at the heart
of Marx's account of history. Marx viewed labor throughout history, in
all societies and in all modes of production, from the earliest
paleolithic hunter gatherers through to feudal societies and to modern
capitalist economies as an "everlasting Nature-imposed condition of
human existence" that compels humans to join socially to produce their
means of subsistence.
Forces and relations of production
Marx
identified two mutually interdependent structures of humans interaction
with nature and the process of producing their subsistence: the forces of production and relations of production.
Forces of production
The forces of production
are everything that humans use to make the things that society needs.
They include human labor and the raw materials, land, tools, instruments
and knowledge required for production. The flint sharpened spears and
harpoons developed by early humans in the late Paleolithic
period are all forces of production. Over time, the forces of
production tend to develop and expand as new skills, knowledge and
technology (for example wooden scratch plows then heavier iron plows)
are put to use to meet human needs.
From one generation to the next, technical skills, evolving traditions
of practice and mechanical innovations are reproduced and disseminated.
Relations of production
Marx
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.
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 labor
in which people not only carry out different kinds of labor but occupy
different social positions on the basis of those differences. The most
important such division is that between manual and intellectual labor
whereby one class produces a given society's wealth while another is
able to monopolize control of the means of production. In this way, both govern that society and live off of the wealth generated by the laboring classes.
Base and superstructure
Marx identified society's relations of production (arising on the basis of given productive forces) as the economic base
of society. He also explained that on the foundation of the economic
base, there arise certain political institutions, laws, customs,
culture, etc., and ideas, ways of thinking, morality, etc. These
constitute the political/ideological "superstructure"
of society. This superstructure not only has its origin in the economic
base, but its features also ultimately correspond to the character and
development of that economic base, i.e. the way people organize society,
its relations of production, and its mode of production. G.A. Cohen argues in Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence
that a society's superstructure stabilizes or entrenches its economic
structure, but that the economic base is primary and the superstructure
secondary. That said, it is precisely because the superstructure
strongly affects the base that the base selects that superstructure. As Charles Taylor
wrote: "These two directions of influence are so far from being rivals
that they are actually complementary. The functional explanation
requires that the secondary factor tend to have a causal effect on the
primary, for this dispositional fact is the key feature of the
explanation."
It is because the influences in the two directions are not symmetrical
that it makes sense to speak of primary and secondary factors, even
where one is giving a non-reductionist, "holistic" account of social
interaction.
To summarize, history develops in accordance with the following observations:
Humans are inevitably involved in productive relations (roughly
speaking, economic relationships or institutions), which constitute the
most decisive social relations. These relations progress with the development of the productive forces. They are largely determined by the division of labor, which in turn tends to determine social class.
Relations of production
are both determined by the means and forces of production and set the
conditions of their development. For example, capitalism tends to
increase the rate at which the forces develop and stresses the accumulation of capital.
The relations of production define the mode of production, e.g. the
capitalist mode of production is characterized by the polarization of
society into capitalists and workers.
The superstructure—the
cultural and institutional features of a society, its ideological
materials—is ultimately an expression of the mode of production on which
the society is founded.
Every type of state is a powerful institution
of the ruling class; the state is an instrument which one class uses to
secure its rule and enforce its preferred relations of production and
its exploitation onto society.
State power is usually only transferred from one class to another by social and political upheaval.
When a given relation of production no longer supports further
progress in the productive forces, either further progress is strangled,
or 'revolution' must occur.
The actual historical process is not predetermined but depends on
class struggle, especially the elevation of class consciousness and
organization of the working class.
Key implications in the study and understanding of history
Many
writers note that historical materialism represented a revolution in
human thought, and a break from previous ways of understanding the
underlying basis of change within various human societies. As Marx puts
it, "a coherence arises in human history"
because each generation inherits the productive forces developed
previously and in turn further develops them before passing them on to
the next generation. Further, this coherence increasingly involves more
of humanity the more the productive forces develop and expand to bind
people together in production and exchange.
This understanding counters the notion that human history is
simply a series of accidents, either without any underlying cause or
caused by supernatural beings or forces exerting their will on society.
Historical materialism posits that history is made as a result of
struggle between different social classes rooted in the underlying
economic base. According to G. A. Cohen, author of Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence,
the level of development of society's productive forces (i.e.,
society's technological powers, including tools, machinery, raw
materials, and labor power) determines society's economic structure, in
the sense that it selects a structure of economic relations that tends
best to facilitate further technological growth. In historical
explanation, the overall primacy of the productive forces can be
understood in terms of two key theses:
(a) The productive forces tend to develop throughout history (the Development Thesis). (b)
The nature of the production relations of a society is explained by the
level of development of its productive forces (the Primacy Thesis
proper).
In saying that productive forces have a universal tendency to
develop, Cohen's reading of Marx is not claiming that productive forces
always develop or that they never decline. Their development may be
temporarily blocked, but because human beings have a rational interest
in developing their capacities to control their interactions with
external nature in order to satisfy their wants, the historical tendency
is strongly toward further development of these capacities.
Broadly, the importance of the study of history lies in the ability of history to explain the present. John Bellamy Foster
asserts that historical materialism is important in explaining history
from a scientific perspective, by following the scientific method, as
opposed to belief-system theories like creationism and intelligent design, which do not base their beliefs on verifiable facts and hypotheses.
Modes of production
The main modes of production that Marx identified include primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism and communism. Mercantilism, mixed economy (state-capitalism) and socialism
are sometimes included in the modes of production by later authors. In
each of these stages of production, people interact with nature and
production in different ways. Any surplus from that production was
distributed differently. Marx propounded that humanity first began
living in primitive communist societies, then came the ancient societies such as Rome and Greece which were based on a ruling class of citizens and a class of slaves, then feudalism which was based on nobles and serfs, and then capitalism which is based on the capitalist class (bourgeoisie) and the working class (proletariat).
In his idea of a future communist society, Marx explains that classes
would no longer exist, and therefore the exploitation of one class by
another is abolished..
Ancient cave painting showing the primitive communist mode of production
Primitive communism
To historical materialists, hunter-gatherer societies, also known as primitive communist
societies, were structured so that economic forces and political forces
were one and the same. Societies generally did not have a state,
property, money, nor social classes. Due to their limited means of
production (hunting and gathering) each individual was only able to
produce enough to sustain themselves, thus without any surplus there is
nothing to exploit. A slave at this point would only be an extra mouth
to feed. This inherently makes them communist in social relations
although primitive in productive forces..
Ancient mode of production
Ancient Egyptian art depicting the ancient mode of production
Slave societies, the ancient mode of production, were formed as productive forces advanced, namely due to agriculture and its ensuing abundance which led to the abandonment of nomadic society. Slave societies were marked by their use of slavery and minor private property; production for use
was the primary form of production. Slave society is considered by
historical materialists to be the first class-stratified society formed
of citizens and slaves. Surplus from agriculture was distributed to the citizens, who exploited the slaves that worked the fields.
Medieval art depicting the feudal mode of production
Feudal mode of production
The feudal mode of production
emerged from slave society (e.g. in Europe after the collapse of the
Roman Empire), coinciding with the further advance of productive forces.
Feudal society's class relations were marked by an entrenched nobility and serfdom. Simple commodity production existed in the form of artisans and merchants. This merchant class would grow in size and eventually form the bourgeoisie. However, production was still largely for use.
Capitalist mode of production
The capitalist mode of production
materialized when the rising bourgeois class grew large enough to
institute a shift in the productive forces. The bourgeoisie's primary
form of production was in the form of commodities, i.e. they produced with the purpose of exchanging their products. As this commodity production
grew, the old feudal systems came into conflict with the new capitalist
ones; feudalism was then eschewed as capitalism emerged. The
bourgeoisie's influence expanded until commodity production became fully
generalized:
Factory workers in the capitalist mode of production
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial
production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for
the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its
place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing
middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds
vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
With the rise of the bourgeoisie came the concepts of nation-states and nationalism.
Marx argued that capitalism completely separated the economic and
political forces. Marx took the state to be a sign of this separation—it
existed to manage the massive conflicts of interest which arose between
the proletariat and bourgeoisie in capitalist society. Marx observed
that nations arose at the time of the appearance of capitalism on the
basis of community of economic life, territory, language, certain
features of psychology, and traditions of everyday life and culture. In The Communist Manifesto
Marx and Engels explained that the coming into existence of
nation-states was the result of class struggle, specifically of the
capitalist class's attempts to overthrow the institutions of the former
ruling class. Prior to capitalism, nations were not the primary
political form. Vladimir Lenin shared a similar view on nation-states.
There were two opposite tendencies in the development of nations under
capitalism. One of them was expressed in the activation of national life
and national movements against the oppressors. The other was expressed
in the expansion of links among nations, the breaking down of barriers
between them, the establishment of a unified economy and of a world
market (globalization); the first is a characteristic of lower-stage capitalism and the second a more advanced form, furthering the unity of the international proletariat.[51] Alongside this development was the forced removal of the serfdom
from the countryside to the city, forming a new proletarian class. This
caused the countryside to become reliant on large cities. Subsequently,
the new capitalist mode of production also began expanding into other
societies that had not yet developed a capitalist system (e.g. the scramble for Africa). The Communist Manifesto stated:
National differences and antagonism between peoples are
daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the
bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity
in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding
thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still
faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is
one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also
be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also
be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within
the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come
to an end.
Under capitalism, the bourgeoisie and proletariat become the two primary classes. Class struggle
between these two classes was now prevalent. With the emergence of
capitalism, productive forces were now able to flourish, causing the Industrial Revolution
in Europe. Despite this, however, the productive forces eventually
reach a point where they can no longer expand, causing the same collapse
that occurred at the end of feudalism:
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of
production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up
such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer
who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he
has called up by his spells. [...] The productive forces at the disposal
of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions
of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful
for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they
overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois
society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.
Communist mode of production
Lower-stage of communism
The bourgeoisie, as Marx stated in The Communist Manifesto,
has "forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called
into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working
class—the proletarians."
Historical materialists henceforth believe that the modern proletariat
are the new revolutionary class in relation to the bourgeoisie, in the
same way that the bourgeoisie was the revolutionary class in relation to
the nobility under feudalism. The proletariat, then, must seize power as the new revolutionary class in a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Between capitalist and communist society there lies the
period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other.
Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the
state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Marx also describes a communist society developed alongside the proletarian dictatorship:
Within the co-operative society based on common ownership
of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their
products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear
here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by
them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no
longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of
total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today
on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges
from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically,
morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the
old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual
producer receives back from society—after the deductions have been
made—exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his
individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day
consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual
labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working
day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from
society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after
deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he
draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same
amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to
society in one form, he receives back in another.
This lower-stage of communist society is, according to Marx,
analogous to the lower-stage of capitalist society, i.e. the transition
from feudalism to capitalism, in that both societies are "stamped with
the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges." The
emphasis on the idea that modes of production do not exist in isolation
but rather are materialized from the previous existence is a core idea
in historical materialism.
There is considerable debate among communists regarding the nature of this society. Some such as Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, and other Marxist-Leninists
believe that the lower-stage of communism constitutes its own mode of
production, which they call socialist rather than communist.
Marxist-Leninists believe that this society may still maintain the
concepts of property, money, and commodity production.
Marx made the following comments on the higher-phase of communist society:
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor,
and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor,
has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's
prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the
all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of
co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow
horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
In the 1872 Preface to the French edition of Das Kapital
Vol. 1, Marx emphasized that "[t]here is no royal road to science, and
only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a
chance of gaining its luminous summits."
Reaching a scientific understanding required conscientious, painstaking
research, instead of philosophical speculation and unwarranted,
sweeping generalizations. Having abandoned abstract philosophical
speculation in his youth, Marx himself showed great reluctance during
the rest of his life about offering any generalities or universal truths
about human existence or human history.
The first explicit and systematic summary of the materialist interpretation of history to be published was Engels's book Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science, written with Marx's approval and guidance, and often referred to as the Anti-Dühring.
One of the polemics was to ridicule the easy "world schematism" of
philosophers, who invented the latest wisdom from behind their writing
desks. Towards the end of his life, in 1877, Marx wrote a letter to the
editor of the Russian paper Otetchestvennye Zapisky, which significantly contained the following disclaimer:
Russia... will not succeed without
having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians;
and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she
will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. That is
all. But that is not enough for my critic. He feels obliged to
metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in
Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche
generale imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic
circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately
arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the
greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most
complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring
and shaming me too much.)
Marx goes on to illustrate how the same factors can in different
historical contexts produce very different results so that quick and
easy generalizations are not really possible. To indicate how seriously
Marx took research when he died, his estate contained several cubic
metres of Russian statistical publications (it was, as the old Marx
observed, in Russia that his ideas gained the most influence)..
Insofar as Marx and Engels regarded historical processes as law-governed processes, the possible future directions of historical development were to a great extent limited and conditioned by what happened before. Retrospectively, historical processes could be understood to have happened by necessity
in certain ways and not others, and to some extent at least, the most
likely variants of the future could be specified on the basis of careful
study of the known facts.
Towards the end of his life, Engels commented several times about the abuse of historical materialism..
In a letter to Conrad Schmidt dated 5 August 1890, he stated:
And if this man [i.e., Paul Barth] has not yet discovered that while the material mode of existence is the primum agens
[first agent] this does not preclude the ideological spheres from
reacting upon it in their turn, though with a secondary effect, he
cannot possibly have understood the subject he is writing about. [...]
The materialist conception of history has a lot of [dangerous friends]
nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history. Just
as Marx used to say, commenting on the French "Marxists" of the late
70s: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist." [...] In general, the word
"materialistic" serves many of the younger writers in Germany as a mere
phrase with which anything and everything is labelled without further
study, that is, they stick to this label and then consider the question
disposed of. But our conception of history is above all a guide to
study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian.
All history must be studied afresh, and the conditions of existence of
the different formations of society must be examined individually before
the attempt is made to deduce them from the political, civil law,
aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc., views corresponding to them. Up
to now but little has been done here because only a few people have got
down to it seriously. In this field we can utilize heaps of help, it is
immensely big, and anyone who will work seriously can achieve much and
distinguish himself. But instead of this too many of the younger Germans
simply make use of the phrase historical materialism (and everything
can be turned into a phrase) only in order to get their own relatively
scanty historical knowledge—for economic history is still in its
swaddling clothes!—constructed into a neat system as quickly as
possible, and they then deem themselves something very tremendous. And
after that, a Barth can come along and attack the thing itself, which in
his circle has indeed been degraded to a mere phrase.
Finally, in a letter to Franz Mehring dated 14 July 1893, Engels stated:
[T]here is only one other point
lacking, which, however, Marx and I always failed to stress enough in
our writings and in regard to which we are all equally guilty. That is
to say, we all laid, and were bound to lay, the main emphasis, in the
first place, on the derivation of political, juridical and other
ideological notions, and of actions arising through the medium of these
notions, from basic economic facts. But in so doing we neglected the
formal side—the ways and means by which these notions, etc., come
about—for the sake of the content. This has given our adversaries a
welcome opportunity for misunderstandings, of which Paul Barth is a
striking example.
Engels warned about conceiving of Marx's ideas as deterministic,
saying: "According to the materialist conception of history, the
ultimately determining element in history is the production and
reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever
asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic
element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into
a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase." On another occasion, Engels remarked that "younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it".
In his 1940 essay Theses on the Philosophy of History, scholar Walter Benjamin compares historical materialism to the Turk,
an 18th-century device which was promoted as a mechanized automaton
which could defeat skilled chess players but actually concealed a human
who controlled the machine. Benjamin suggested that, despite Marx's
claims to scientific objectivity, historical materialism was actually
quasi-religious. Like the Turk, wrote Benjamin, "[t]he puppet called
'historical materialism' is always supposed to win. It can do this with
no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services
of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight." Benjamin's friend and colleague Gershom Scholem would argue that Benjamin's critique of historical materialism was so definitive that, as Mark Lilla would write, "nothing remains of historical materialism [...] but the term itself".
Continued development
In a foreword to his essay Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
(1886), three years after Marx's death, Engels claimed confidently that
"the Marxist world outlook has found representatives far beyond the
boundaries of Germany and Europe and in all the literary languages of
the world."
Indeed, in the years after Marx and Engels' deaths, "historical
materialism" was identified as a distinct philosophical doctrine and was
subsequently elaborated upon and systematized by Orthodox Marxist and Marxist–Leninist thinkers such as Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Georgi Plekhanov and Nikolai Bukharin. This occurred despite the fact that many of Marx's earlier works on historical materialism, including The German Ideology, remained unpublished until the 1930s.
The substantivistethnographic approach of economic anthropologist and sociologistKarl Polanyi bears similarities to historical materialism. Polanyi distinguishes between the formal definition of economics as the logic of rational choice between limited resources and a substantive definition of economics as the way humans make their living from their natural and social environment. In The Great Transformation
(1944), Polanyi asserts that both the formal and substantive
definitions of economics hold true under capitalism, but that the formal
definition falls short when analyzing the economic behavior of
pre-industrial societies, whose behavior was more often governed by
redistribution and reciprocity. While Polanyi was influenced by Marx, he rejected the primacy of economic determinism in shaping the course of history, arguing that rather than being a realm unto itself, an economy is embedded within its contemporary social institutions, such as the state in the case of the market economy.
Perhaps the most notable recent exploration of historical materialism is G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, which inaugurated the school of Analytical Marxism.
Cohen advances a sophisticated technological-determinist interpretation
of Marx "in which history is, fundamentally, the growth of human
productive power, and forms of society rise and fall according as they
enable or impede that growth."
Jürgen Habermas believes historical materialism "needs revision in many respects", especially because it has ignored the significance of communicative action.
Göran Therborn
has argued that the method of historical materialism should be applied
to historical materialism as an intellectual tradition, and to the
history of Marxism itself.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union
in the early 1990s, much of Marxist thought was seen as anachronistic. A
major effort to "renew" historical materialism comes from historian Ellen Meiksins Wood,
who wrote in 1995 that, "There is something off about the assumption
that the collapse of Communism represents a terminal crisis for Marxism.
One might think, among other things, that in a period of capitalist
triumphalism there is more scope than ever for the pursuit of Marxism's
principal project, the critique of capitalism."
[T]he
kernel of historical materialism was an insistence on the historicity
and specificity of capitalism, and denial that its laws were the
universal laws of history...this focus on the specificity of capitalism,
as a moment with historical origins as well as an end, with a systemic
logic specific to it, encourages a truly historical sense lacking in
classical political economy and conventional ideas of progress, and this
had potentially fruitful implications for the historical study of other
modes of production too.
Referencing Marx's Theses on Feuerbach,
Wood argued for historical materialism to be understood as "a
theoretical foundation for interpreting the world in order to change
it."
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