Historical Materialism

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The central thesis of this article is that historical materialism provides the only scientific method for understanding human history and the trajectory of social development. The claim is that the driving force of history is not ideas, consciousness, or great individuals, but rather the development of the productive forces — humanity's capacity to master nature through labour — and the consequent struggle between classes over the surplus produced. Each epoch of class society (slavery, feudalism, capitalism) arises, develops, and eventually becomes a fetter on further development, creating the conditions for its own supersession. The article argues that capitalism, like all previous class societies, has exhausted its progressive potential and that the working class, uniquely among exploited classes, is historically positioned to overthrow it and establish a society of abundance.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws directly on the classical Marxist tradition, particularly Marx's 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, from which the foundational proposition — that social being determines consciousness — is taken. Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State provides the framework for understanding primitive communism and the transition to class society. The article also relies heavily on Marx's Capital (especially Volume III on the forms of surplus-labour extraction and Volume I on primitive accumulation) and on Lenin's theory of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism.

The theoretical architecture is orthodox and unapologetic. It deploys the base-superstructure model without mechanical reductionism, insisting that ideas matter but are constrained by material conditions. The treatment of the Asiatic Mode of Production follows Marx's scattered remarks on Asian societies, though the article does not engage with the substantial debates within Marxism about whether this constitutes a distinct mode of production or a variant of slavery/feudalism. The analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism follows the classic narrative of primitive accumulation, with the English enclosures and the dissolution of the monasteries as central examples.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article was originally published in 1983 as a supplement to a journal of the Marxist Workers' Tendency of the ANC, and the 2019 republication on marxist.com does not update its empirical references. The conjuncture it addresses is therefore the early 1980s — a period of capitalist crisis following the end of the post-war boom, with mass unemployment, the rise of monetarism under Thatcher and Reagan, and the intensification of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. The article's reference to the British national debt standing at "about £100,000 million" dates it precisely.

However, the argument's conjunctural relevance extends beyond its original moment. The theoretical framework it presents is intended as a weapon for understanding the current period of capitalist stagnation, rising geopolitical rivalry between imperialist powers, and the deepening crisis of the global system. The analysis of how capitalism "produces social disasters inconceivable under previous forms of society — crises taking the form of overproduction" speaks directly to the post-2008 era of repeated financial crises, austerity, and the failure of reformist solutions. The discussion of imperialism as the epoch of finance capital fused with monopoly capital provides the theoretical basis for understanding contemporary conflicts between the US, China, and Russia.

Where the Argument Continues

The article is explicitly an introductory text, and its schematic treatment of several periods leaves much open for development. The Asiatic Mode of Production receives only a few paragraphs and is treated as a historical dead end rather than a subject of ongoing Marxist debate. The transition from slavery to feudalism is presented as a European story, with no discussion of whether this trajectory is universal. The analysis of the working class as revolutionary agent is asserted rather than demonstrated through contemporary evidence.

These gaps are filled elsewhere in the IDOM corpus. The theoretical foundations of historical materialism are developed more rigorously in Alan Woods's The History of Philosophy: A Marxist Perspective and in the ongoing series of articles on dialectical materialism. The analysis of contemporary imperialism is taken up in numerous articles on the Ukraine war, the rise of China, and the crisis of the European Union. The question of working-class consciousness and revolutionary strategy is addressed in texts on the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and the experience of Trotskyism in the twentieth century. The Against the Stream podcast regularly applies historical materialist method to current events.

Connections

This article should be read alongside Marx's own Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Engels's Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which together provide the classical statement of historical materialism. For the analysis of primitive communism, Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is essential. For the theory of imperialism, Lenin's pamphlet of the same name is the canonical text. For the analysis of capitalist crisis, Marx's Capital Volume III, particularly the chapters on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, provides the theoretical grounding that this article only gestures toward.

Within the IDOM corpus, the article connects to Mick Brooks's other writings on Marxist economics and to the broader educational project of the Revolutionary Communist International. It is a companion piece to the many IDOM articles that apply historical materialism to specific historical episodes — the English Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution — and to contemporary political developments.

Key Quotes

1. "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness."

2. "The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element."

3. "Capitalist production seeks continually to overcome these immanent barriers but overcomes them only by means which again place the barriers in its way and on a more formidable scale. The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself."

4. "The working class, on the other hand, is concentrated in great masses by the very nature of factory production. Unlike the peasantry, their only strength lies in collective action. Through collective exploitation, the working class are trained and educated by capitalism itself to act as the system's grave-diggers."

5. "The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the human head... The free development of individuals and hence...the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific, etc., development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them."