Karl Marx Historical Materialism

Karl Marx Historical Materialism.

Marx's materialist theory of history

Marx's theory of history is called 'historical materialism' because of his belief that economics (material goods) determine how history evolves, not ideology, personality, or other popular theories of the 19th century when he wrote. "Most struggles in history are class struggles, even though the participants profess other goals. For example, Protestantism reflects the rising capitalist class" (McCarthy 1995). Marx wrote that history evolves as a series of class struggles between the haves and the have-nots. In his own era, the 'haves' were the bourgeois while the 'have-nots' were the proletariat, or the factory workers. The proletariat lived in a continual state of exploitation by the bourgeois. The bourgeois did not work but rather only owned the means of production. The proletariat slaved away, but did not own the fruits of their labor. They merely rented their labor to the factory owners for most of the day, experienced terrible wear and tear upon their bodies and made far more items than they needed, for which they were paid a wage. The owner then could make a profit far in excess of his initial investment by selling these products. An owner's livelihood was based upon property ownership, not toil and was fundamentally unjust. Only when there was 'an end to history' and the means of production were all owned communally, Marx said, would the cycle of historical materialism and class struggle finally come to an end.

Although other epochs of history were interpreted in non-economic terms, Marx believed this was designed to fundamentally conceal how the have-nots of the world had been oppressed for so long. For example, under feudalism the 'haves' were the aristocrats while the 'have-nots' were the serfs (McCarthy 1995). The current system of capitalism seems to offer some promise that people can become able to 'pull themselves up by their own bootstraps' but this is a lie. The surplus of labor means that wages will always be driven down and innovations in technology reduce the need of the capitalists to employ workers (McCarthy 1995). However, Marx believed that worker discontent would eventually grow so great that communist revolution was inevitable. He conceptualized history as a continually evolving process, ending with the ultimate form of the most just society: "The successive stages of history include primitive communism characterized by equalitarian hunting and gathering, barbarism characterized by rule by chiefs, slave society with a slave class and agriculture, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism" (McCarthy 1995).