This is Part Two in a four-part series on the Marxist philosophical concept of historical materialism. Ordinarily, each essay in this newsletter is paywalled one month after publication; for this series, every installment will be free to read until Part Four has been out for a month, after which only Part One will remain free in perpetuity. Please consider subscribing to retain access to the archive of all my essays thus far.
Introduction
Before continuing this series, it must be said in no uncertain language that though I critique Marxists by using Marx, it is not the case that Marx’s Marxism was necessarily “purer” than the Marxism which exists today. Alvin W. Gouldner’s Against Fragmentation suggests a continuity between the material conditions which spawned Marx’s original works and those later political forces which have taken up his mantle and ran with them. Marx was a disaffected academic, a grandiose narcissist, and a degenerate gambler, fornicator, and drinker who squandered his familial wealth while living off the patronage of his benefactor and co-author Friedrich Engels. His career trajectory began as all disaffected intellectuals do, on the path to becoming a gatekeeper and propagandist of knowledge and information within the state, being denied access to positions of academic prestige, and in turn, calling upon the state which employed successful academics to be dismantled.
Gouldner notes that within the 19th century universities which produced Marx, there was a “culture of critical discourse,” wherein one could say and do the most outlandish things for the sake of furthering discussion, stoking investigation, and formulating both defenses and attacks against preconceived knowledge. It was upon exiting the university that Marx was unable to come to terms with the reality that this culture of openness and brazenness did not exist outside of that sphere, and that the only people who would be elevated to prominent, even lucrative positions of intellectual work were those capable of guiding public discourse in directions amenable to the state’s interests. His work at the time, it turned out, was simply not that useful to state institutions. It was only upon attaching himself to Engels, a mid-size industrialist who wanted to understand the mechanisms of his field and the origins of capital, that he was able to produce the works that he did. Without that lifeline from a capitalist benefactor, there would be no Marxist tradition to speak of, and that exact same tradition of contradiction continues today.
Though Marx’s philosophy and his theories on society, history, and revolution have all been reinterpreted and distorted by others who have taken up his name, this does not signal a break with the class origins of Marxism. It has never been an ideology of and from the proletariat, despite championing the proletariat as the revolutionary agent which will usher in the next historical epoch. In neither the Soviet Union nor in the People’s Republic of China, the only two significant Marxist states which have existed, did the proletariat actually lead the revolutions which created those states. Instead, their respective Parties were formed by intellectual leaders originally from wealthier peasant castes whose holdings were at risk due to the decayed condition of their respective empires. The proletariat in those countries only emerged after their Communist revolutions.
Given this history and given that generic Marxists today—who may or may not interpret Marx at his word—wield a substantial amount of political power in liberal societies, it is fair to ask why someone would bother rehabilitating historical materialism for active use in the present day. The simple answer is that historical materialism applied properly, with relentless self-critique of the observer as well as the observed, is still a useful tool regardless of its class origins or the terrors that it had raised in the past. This particular theory of history, even with the elements that have become dogmas, is still more clarifying than the other prevailing theories of today—including its own dogmatic form.
But political actors create history every day without any one particularly sound theory of history; why, with this being the case, would historical materialism even be useful for achieving specific historical outcomes? For the simple reason that mere political actors do not secure historical outcomes without an accurate outlook on how civilizations develop and decay, especially in times of novel crisis. The old kings believed their reign would last forever, and on an individual human scale, they certainly would have appeared to have done so; and yet, they were well aware of the Roman Empire and its centuries-long decline. These kings had developed their own theories of history and their own processes for handling internal and external crises alike which kept their civilizations going for over a millennium. The monarchies at the beginning of that epoch looked nothing like the monarchies at the very end, and yet there was still a continuity, a civilizational Ship of Theseus. Still, they witnessed their own demise in successive developments and cataclysms which are only now beginning to escape living memory as the liberal capitalist epoch has cemented itself as the globally dominant form of political economy. Those outlooks succumbed to material forces which they were unable to anticipate or resist. Historical materialism provides a means for understanding why they collapsed and lays the groundwork for understanding and putting to use the human condition today as we look ahead to the next epoch, if indeed we are on the cusp of it.
Key to using historical materialism wisely is not to allow our downstream assumptions stemming from it to metastasize into unfalsifiable dogmas resistant to revision if things develop differently than expected.
Downstream Assertions
Astute scholars of Marx will note that there were several bullet points to the analytic form which I elided in the prior section. Namely, I refrained from discussing in depth class struggle, his epochs of history, and Communism, the ultimate destination for Marx’s theory of history. My reason for doing so is because each of these concepts contain elements which very quickly slide into dogmatism as a result of the analytic form’s self-assertion that it is concerned with objective reality. Already at point 7 in the prior section, “Human social conditions are a reflection of such objective material conditions,” there is room for common Marxist dogmas and vulgar sociology to grow. I omitted them as I did not want to cloud any reader’s understanding of the philosophical basis of these dogmas, nor did I want to put the cart before the horse in analyzing them.
From point 7, we arrive at the primacy of human civilization: Survival. Human social conditions being a reflection of the physical forces which make all things possible imply that our social conditions are built on the physical necessities of survival. Human beings need, at their most basic, fuel, water, protection from the elements, and methods of sexual reproduction and child-rearing so that the next generation may also survive long enough to reproduce. Long before we ever arrived at the historical stage labeled “primitive communism,” or the hunter-gatherer epoch, we had already developed various means of passing on prior knowledge. In more recent studies of the animal kingdom, it appears we are not unique in this capacity, only in the volume and quality of knowledge we are able to create and pass on within a single generation.
Thus, all technologies human beings have developed over the years has been downstream of this survival drive, our social and spiritual conditions included. When it has been amenable to survival to act as a slave, we have submitted and acted as slaves; when as kings, we have acted as kings. This is on a species-wide basis, however, not specific to individuals; a king suddenly forced to become a slave (or more rarely vice versa) will struggle to fulfill this role, and every fiber in his being will rebel against this, as it is not his pedigree. The biological accumulation survival knowledge of this or that caste cannot be overcome in one generation. Our class functions over successive generations, themselves reflections of our physical environment, the pressures different groups have had to overcome, and the technologies we have developed to overcome them, have been embedded in our genes and are as meaningfully real as sex or race.
But before we can understand class struggle as outlined above, we must understand what class is. Class, in the Marxist sense, is one’s relation to production. It is not the specific type of production involved, but one’s relation to it. A Roman slave mining gold under the supervision of the legion does not belong to the same class as the ‘49er attempting to strike it rich in the California desert despite being engaged in the extraction of the same material, possibly using similar methods. In the former case, his relation to production is that of a slave: He did not choose this life, and he cannot choose otherwise. He is not free to keep the gold he finds, nor is he free to trade it. He is as much the property of his owner as the mine he works and the gold he extracts. He does not have the freedom to seek another master, can hardly assert the freedom to organize with his fellow slaves, and what little rights he does have exist solely to ensure he doesn’t expire while laboring. In contrast, the ‘49er may keep whatever he finds and sell it for a handsome profit—provided he is able to physically defend it and his own person from the nefarious criminals that have followed him into the untamed wilderness specifically to rob him.
Likewise, the ‘49er who left for California of his own accord to profit solely from his own staked claim and his labor is very different from the late 19th century miner working for a monopolistic mining enterprise. Like the slave, the latter is unable to keep what he finds or sell it for a profit. Despite him putting in the labor, just like the ‘49er, it is the property of his employer, as is the pickaxe, as is the mine, and likely the very town in which he lives with his family. He is not, however, a slave; he rents labor to the company who owns the land, material, and equipment on which he lives, and is compensated a portion of the profit from the sale of this gold, his compensation according to the market rate for laborers like him. But, he still owns no productive land nor the means to produce anything from the land. He is a proletarian, so named because the last time such a class existed in large numbers —the proletarii—was towards the middle of the Roman Empire.
The Origins of Class
Millennia prior to Marx’s arrival in the historical record, human beings had organized themselves into classes. For all this time, this unbroken evolutionary chain, different societies exhibited varying levels of development, class structure, methods of production, political institutions, religious doctrines, cultural forms, etc.; how to organize the sum total of human activity into one cohesive metanarrative that speaks to the enormous range of our abilities across distance and time? What forces were at play which caused empires to rise and to fall, why do stages of civilizational development look similar even in places that have had limited contact with one another—and why has their downfall been, especially closer to the modern era, increasingly caused by humans ourselves?
The historical materialist formulation is thus:
All living organisms require certain resources to survive and continue to evolve.
Under resource pressure, human beings evolved to cooperate in order to maximize their chances at survival. This is the epoch of primitive communism, wherein resources are communal and humans live in small clans.
The development of agriculture led to the first economic surpluses, as resource supply could be controlled by human beings rather than being largely dependent on environmental factors.
The unequal production of surplus due to variable factors (including human diversity in intelligence, adaptation, and capacity for labor) created a need to manage and distribute surplus. This need led to the development of private property.
Simultaneously, surplus freed some members of small human societies from agricultural work and enabled them to develop other technologies and pursue other trades. The need to defend the collective from peoples who had not yet developed surplus also became apparent during this time. This was the development of specialization.
Specialization changed human beings’ survival pressures; cooperation within larger social systems became essential. Civilized man can no longer survive by hunting megafauna or scrounging for roots with small clans. To survive, he must perform tasks of a quantifiable value to his fellow man.
Property, knowledge, and specialized skills began to be passed down through familial lineages. As specialization became more pronounced, societies became more complex. Stratification emerged as certain productive roles provided qualitatively and quantifiably different values.
The state emerged to protect surplus and the mechanisms of its accumulation. The class responsible for managing the production of surplus became intertwined and inextricable from military power.
Wars of conquest between early states and barbarian factions led to the emergence of slavery, creating a much wider gap between the lowest and highest classes in society. Defeated warriors were taken as prisoners and their labor became a form of property unto itself.
Laws, ideologies, and religious doctrines justifying the existence of class stratification emerged, encoding these systems of surplus accumulation into the human cultural psyche.
These developments occurred independently at various places and times around the world, at some points co-occurring without any evidence of communication between different civilizations. At some points, certain civilizations were extinguished and these methods of productive control had to be rediscovered. This indicates that civilizational development is as much an iterative and evolutionary process as the origin of species.
The Origin of the Theory of Class Struggle
Marx, like Hegel before him, sought to explain the unfurling of history itself. It is important to note here that though Marx provided a critique of Hegel, this critique was not a negation of Hegel in his entirety. It’s been said that Marx’s dialectics “set Hegel upright,” or in other words, is an inversion of Hegel’s dialectics. He took no serious issue with the iterative and evolutionary process as described by Hegel, merely with the starting point of the process. Rather than peering into the conscious minds of historical actors and how they clash, Marx instead allowed us to look past the prose, the pamphlets, the symbolism, and instead look directly at actions as they happen, look at developments as they occur, and treat (very much like Hegel) each faction not as discrete entities but as organisms in a hermetically-sealed terrarium. Marx’s concern was with explaining the behaviors of these organisms as pertains to their means of survival, the attainment of which comes well before their conscious understanding of why they do what they do.
Where in primitive communism, human beings living within their small societies needed to collaborate in order to survive, often struggling against other clans encroaching upon the same scarce resources, civilized man instead struggles for control of the surplus generated by their society. At the same time that participation in a civilization protected individuals from the savagery of nature or enslavement by marauding clans, one now had to struggle within civilization both to generate surplus and to control the surplus they created.
The Athenians which famously experimented with democracy were not democratic as we would understand the concept today. The majority of the inhabitants of Athens were slaves and thus had no rights to the surplus they generated. Democratic participation and citizenship were only available (and, simultaneously, only the responsibility) of men who owned land. These men controlled the generation and distribution of surplus according to their needs–and only as a consequence of their control, were able to attend to the needs of Athens at large. Where went the landowners, so too went Athens, as their wards did not have the prerequisite skills to manage this surplus.
As later civilizations developed, so too did the economic power of other classes. When it became feasible for merchant classes to operate their affairs without the influence of royal courts, those merchants aligned with other classes disenfranchised by absolutist monarchs to overthrow their leaders and institute the first inklings of modern republicanism. The most successful case of this was the American experiment, where wealthy landowners, merchants, and financial powers were able to set up an entirely parallel political economy to the British Empire virtually from scratch. The conflict, in case readers are unfamiliar, stemmed primarily from the monarchy’s attempts to meddle in the economic affairs of the colonies’ leaders. The imposition of new tarriffs on the colonies to repay debts incurred during the Seven Years’ War led the colonists to leverage their existing political institutions to work around or abolish the tarriffs. The Crown then attempted to curtail the tradition of American political independence, setting into motion the events which led to the Revolutionary War. In a prior age, the New England merchants and financialists would never have been able to resist the Crown; after all, the overriding logic of monarchy was that the entire empire was ultimately the private property of the Crown and could be recalled on that basis at any time. However, even within that original system, merchants had managed to seize for themselves their own accumulation of surplus, and brought themselves to arms to defend it against the waning nobility.
It is clear, then, that there is a firm grounding in the theory of class struggle deciding the fate of civilizations. The extent to which a society is able to manage this struggle between and within its various classes determines whether that society survives or is wholly replaced. Though there had never been an armed revolution against the yeomen farmers who had helped form the American Republic, their power precipitously declined throughout the 19th century, having been virtually eradicated by the dawn of the 20th. Whereas they once had formed the Anti-Federalist faction, one half of a cohesive whole to the political makeup of the US government, by the Progressive Era, they were but one element within much larger coalitions containing many different classes and ethnicities with many competing interests of their own. Their defeat spurred the creation of new political, spiritual, and cultural forms which in turn spawned new economic forms and new conflicts between classes in their wake.
Though Marx developed his theories by observing events on the European continent, especially in Germany and France, I have chosen here to illustrate the origin of this theory using the American example for several reasons. Firstly, I am by no means an expert in the details of the German unfication from the Byzantine political architecture of what remained of the Holy Roman Empire. Secondly, I doubt any of my readers are either, and thus exploring the specific events in Germany which inspired Marx’s theory would likely have gone over people’s heads even if it had been fully researched and laid out; the American case is more easily accessible to myself and to most of my readers (apologies to my European readership). Lastly: This analysis foreshadows the next installment of this series which examines the late modern/contemporary class struggle which is currently ongoing.
Origin of the Communist Ideology
Marx’s definition of communism is well-known: A classless, moneyless, and stateless society, a permanent end to history wherein all surplus is held in common once again, just as it was in primitive society, only with the raw productive power enabled by industrial technologies. This is, to our eyes, utopian, and for good reason: It is exceedingly difficult for civilized man, who has evolved to thrive and to do great things under the pressures of class stratification, to imagine such a world. However, there is a distinction to be drawn between the utopian understanding of communism and the vision of communism which we can surmise Marx would have elaborated had he lived long enough to explain himself. The assumptions made here are based on certain realities of Marx’s beliefs:
Human beings are inherently unequal in physical form, mental capacity, and productive and cultural output. Striving for total equality among men is as much a political impossibility as it is a physical one, even with modern technology’s assistance.
The absence of class hierarchy does not imply the absence of hierarchy in general. Human societies require decisive leadership in order for cooperation to be possible.
Human beings are both members of a collective and individuals unto themselves. A future in which individuals become undifferentiated members of a collective is not a future where man is free.
To arrive at communism would require centuries, possibly millennia of civilizational development. Though he believed attaining socialism (the workers’ state, the dictatorship of the proletariat) was achievable within his lifetime, he also understood that civilizational transitions took place over many generations. He acknowledges this in particular in “On the Jewish Question,” where he alleges that the intense religiosity of secular America during his time is evidence that the old world’s moral codes lived on in men of the new world, and that the creation of radically new religious sects was a manifestation of the failures of secular society to address contemporary social problems.
Marx did state that in a communist world, people would be free to float from one profession to another with ease, working the land in the morning, participating in manufacturing in the afternoon, and fishing in the evening without ever becoming a a farmer, a laborer, or a fisherman. This state of affairs would be the result of socialist polities unleashing the productive forces of humanity for the benefit of all, allowing us all to make use of the wealth so easily generated by the industrial technologies that, in his time as well as ours, currently have us produce for the sake of accumulating surplus for the bourgeoisie.
Though Marx imagined and idealized a world in which all wealth is distributed according to need, he was not under the impression that this meant free-riding would be permissible. On the contrary, his faith in the proletariat as the revolutionary subject who could bring about communism was based on the proletariat’s inherent interest in labor and production. He was steadfast in his belief that socialism could only be achievable in advanced capitalist states, not in the outlying colonies which had only recently been brought to civilization as crudely defined in this essay. For communism to be achievable, the peoples clamoring for it needed to be those willing to put in twice the effort and sacrifice they had already put into creating capitalist society. Parasitic classes and peoples clamoring for communism would only end up hampering the economic developments necessary to make communism a reality. The violence required of such a revolution would be carried out not only against the ruling classes, but also against the pitiful wretches who refuse to contribute anything at all.
Whether or not communism is properly defined, truly destined, or even achievable, it is clear that the process Marx prescribed for attaining it was premised on observations of the real world, and he was well aware both that he would not live to see its fruition and that it would not be a peaceful transition as such evolutionary leaps never are.
Decline into Dogmatism
Almost as soon as Marx’s historical materialism made its way into the public consciousness, they were picked up by jilted academics, failed nobility, and precarious petit bourgeois operatives who immediately dispensed with the aspects of it that were not amenable to their interests. The few truly proletarian groups that ran with them were brutally suppressed and have never recovered virtually anywhere of import.
The decline of Marxism from a social scientific process into a series of secular religious faiths, each more perverted than the last, begins with the thorny issue of Marx treating communism as a preordained destiny, that the only historical stage that we could possibly come upon next would be socialism, which would inevitably lead to communism. This unified theory of historical development, complete with an end stage of a life that sounds all too good to be truly possible, inevitably led to a faith-based approach to applying historical materialism to contemporary issues. Rather than leave this open-ended because the world is an unpredictable place and he was alive only at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution, he instead repeatedly insisted ascendancy of the proletariat was inevitable, and that they would usher in the final epoch of history. While I do not think that our present circumstances have disproven that the proletariat are the only class capable of achieving this historical destiny, I also am not so naive to believe that it is indeed predestined.
That this scientific framework for analyzing history and civilizational development has a preordained endpoint immediately makes it vulnerable to dogmatism. Anything a communist attempts in pursuit of this endpoint immediately allows them to believe that they are enacting a historical destiny which abolishes history altogether. It is a form of eschatology, a revelatory apocalypse with a relatively clear set of instructions on what to do to achieve it: The proletariat must have their class consciousness raised, they must be organized to lead a war against the bourgeoisie, they bourgeoisie must be brought to heel, and the proletariat must establish a state which succeeds in eliminating class divisions. The details on how this is to be achieved obviously differ from era to era, but the overall roadmap is the same. Revolution, to the communist, is an act of faith, the practice of a spiritual belief. This is not abnormal to revolutionary forces or to human beings in general, but it does pollute the waters of a truly scientific approach to achieving a certain stage of historical development.
The obsession with the primacy of class struggle also clouds the communist’s mind. Not every proletarian around the world has the same immediate self-interest. In fact, oftentimes, interests are divided. What’s good for the Chinese working class isn’t necessarily good for the American working class, and this cannot merely be flattened by reminding them that they belong to the same historical destiny according to some 19th century German philosopher. There was a point in the 20th century where such a concept was possible, but only among workers of the European powers. On the eve of World War I, many communists were steadfastly opposed to participating in a continent-wide war, recognizing that the carnage was only in service of financial interests. Some communists, Lenin among them, noted that the war could be an opportunity for communists to revolt against their leaders driving them to slaughter, and for a socialism to emerge out of the colonial powers seeking to destroy one another. Other left-wing groups, however, believed that they could bolster the interests of their national proletariat by encouraging the war as it was, looting their neighbors for resources which they could eventually use to build socialism. In any case, only Lenin succeeded in establishing a socialist-oriented government, whereas the advanced capitalist states saw millions suffer with hardly any significant change occurring at all.
The establishment of governing Communist parties throughout Europe in the aftermath of World War I proved to be an impossibility based on the results we can now clearly look back on. Although the condition of the working class was fairly similar across Europe, and though it was certainly against their interest to shoot at each other in an utterly pointless war, they still did it because of the primacy of their immediate interests. There was nothing organizing their objection to the conflict in a way that could have succeeded in establishing a continental socialist state, thus it never happened.
Vulgar Marxists, however, even with this obvious fact laid out in front of them, will insist that because the working classes of the world still have a shared interest in building communism and thus will fight for it, if only they were not stupid and backwards enough to hold onto the prevailing ideology. Hence, our modern-day communists will allow for the unlimited importation of immigrants on the basis that, in the end, we all have the same historic interest in global communism anyway. They would like for this to be the case but it is clearly not; different national proletariats have different immediate interests. When faced with the reality that working class peoples are largely against the importation of migrants—with whom they must compete for immediately available resources—the dogmatic communist’s response is that those workers are class traitors and should be punished. When faced with the reality that it is the ruling class importing these migrants, and that they are openly used as a tool for covert warfare between hostile nations, the dogmatic communist’s response is that this is just an attempt at dividing a global proletariat that should overcome their differences wherever they may be and unite to overthrow those in power.
Likewise, when examining conflicts between states, they are unable to acknowledge that each state has its own discrete interests and may be engaged in covert warfare to achieve discrete goals that have nothing to do at all with class. While neither state will take actions which subvert the base power of their ruling class (since it is the ruling class which enables the state to conduct warfare in the first place), when the US and Russia come to blows it is not because they are attempting to destroy the organized proletariat in their own countries. The proletariat is already divided, already subject to the whims of the bourgeois class in both countries. There is no need for that to be a primary focus when faced with immediate political pressure from another bourgeois state, particularly one armed with nuclear weapons. On a historical scale, there is truth to class conflict driving historical outcomes and ushering in new epochs, but the immediate pressure between these two states in conflict is not coming from a place of conflict between different classes. Still, vulgar Marxists will insist that because the Russians are the “underdog” in this conflict, this means the decline of the United States’s unipolar world order that this is a positive development for the proletariat when there is nothing substantive to suggest it.
That so many Marxists cannot recognize the primacy of immediate interests and avenues for attaining them is proof that they have taken in historical materialism as a dogma rather than as a means of analyzing the world around them for what it is. They cannot simply let certain things be what they are and work within the confines of the conditions we find ourselves in. And yet, there are still ways in which it is useful, and ways in which it is still being used properly. One need not be a communist to make use of historical materialism, and indeed, the best historical materialists were never communists in the first place. In the next essay, I will discuss some ways in which it has been and still can be used to achieve concrete political ends.